Getting Half-Life 2 to work on 8 MB of VRAM means turning it into an eerily befitting voidscape: 'there were absolutely no effects left'

Half Life 2 on 8MB of VRAM! - YouTube

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Rise and shine, people. Rise and… shine. Not that I wish to imply that you have been sleeping on the fact that Half-Life 2 (HL2) can run on 1,000x less VRAM than today's GPUs. Provided, that is, you're completely fine staring into the void every time you pass a chair.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about what happens when you heavily mod the 20-year-old classic to get it running on a GPU that has just 8 MB of VRAM. That, according to Budget-Builds Official (via Tom's Hardware), is what's required to get the game actually playable on such a weak GPU: some seriously heavy modding.

After booting into the game on a Pine (now XFX) 3D Phantom XP-2800 graphics card which "hardly functions as a display adapter and promises on the box it can game," Budget-Builds finds HL2 to run at what looks like mostly 10-20 fps. For just five minutes that is, because after a few minutes of gameplay, HL2 crashes.

So, Budget-Builds tries a "combination of every single edit and change I could find" to get it working. And not just running, but running smoothly, because 60 fps is the goal.

These changes include "no reflections, minimal textures, no shadows," a forced maximum of DirectX 6, "no anisotropic filtering, no antialiasing," and running at a mighty 320 x 240 resolution. Apparently, "there were absolutely no effects left untouched or allowed to load."

The result? "When we look down," Budget-Builds says, as they walk between the void chairs looming ominously on either side, "we're getting near enough 60 fps."

Yes, void-like objects litter the landscape in this barebones experience, popping in and out of existence thanks to a frightfully close view distance. Just some objects, mind, others seem to render quite far away. Who knows what rules govern this fresh voidscape.

I must say, though, there's something quite appealing about the aesthetic. It's kind of like a waking nightmare, which does befit the HL2 vibe in general.

To achieve this wonderful experience in the same way that Budget-Builds did, all you need is a few hours of free time to fiddle with your settings, an 8 MB GPU like the XP-2800, 1 GB of RAM, a circa-2003 AMD CPU, and Windows XP.

To put the whole 8 MB thing in context, one GPU from the HL2 period was the ATI (now AMD) Radeon 9700 which launched in 2002 and had 128 MB of VRAM. And as the YouTuber points out, a lot of cards back then had just 64 MB of VRAM. But even that is 8x more than they got the game running on here.

And compared to today? Well, most graphics cards have at least 8 GB of VRAM on them these days, meaning they have 1,000x more video memory than is required to get HL2 up and running in this little-known purgatory mode.

Compare this to the new, graphically overhauled version, Half-Life 2 RTX—the demo for which you can try now for free on Steam—and the difference is striking. This new version requires a minimum of my own beloved RTX 3060 Ti, which has 8 GB of VRAM. So the minimum VRAM for the new and overhauled version (made with Nvidia RTX Remix) is 1,000x more than the 8 MB that just about works with the original.

And to be honest, if I could play either the freaky 320 x 240 version shown here, or the brand spanking new version, I'd be tempted to opt for the former. But I'm weird like that—you folks have fun with your ultra-realistic headcrabs while I go and stare into the abyss a while longer.