Two bits of Half Life news. Brad and Matt, I’m sure you’re way ahead of me on this one. Please try to forgive me.

Early rumors stated that Half-Life 2, the most anticipated PC game since PC’s had games, would be fully playable only on Nvidia-based video cards. This sounded wholly unlikely, save for the fact that a few games have already been announced with Nvidia only features, subgames, levels, add-ons, etc… Bear in mind, none of those projects have hit the shelves yet. Still, having recently purchased an ATI DirectX 9 video card, I was a tad concerned.
Well, it seems that it was all a big hubbub over nothing. Here’s a quote from the ATI web site.

Good question, and one that has no doubt been plaguing the budget-minded nerds of the world for some time. It appears that Half-Life’s developers, Valve, have considered this very carefully, and implemented additional rendering modes to accomodate most recent video cards. All games render differently on different hardware. Most show the best quality they can, according to the hardware capabilities and certain settings and modes controlled by the user. Half-Life 2 will initially run scans on the system hardware and determine what is possible and what is suggested on that particular machine. There are rumors that the game may even have a “Smart-Adjust” setting which could alter rendering modes based on the game’s performance.

It appears that any Direct X video card with at least 64MB of Ram and a P4 2.2 or better CPU will run the game just fine. If you are using DX6 or 7 or have an older card with under 64 MB of ram, you may consider an additional 3D accelerator. This is often a cheaper and less involved solution to replacing your video card. The game makes use of Direct X 9, so certain dynamic shadows, fractal reflections, and other pixel rendering schemes will not show up in sub DX9 cards.