Half-Life 2 isn’t hard to run by any means, being released in late 2004 and needing no more a 256MB of RAM, a 1.2 GHz processor, and a DirectX 7 compatible graphics card from 20 years back — at least that’s what the launch requirements mandated. But what if you couple it with nothing more than effectively a display adapter with a paltry 8MB frame buffer and 2000-era hardware? YouTuber Budget-Builds Official did just that by putting Pine Technology’s 3D Phantom XP 2800 through its paces and highlighting the many compromises you need to make to achieve a stable experience.
In an attempt to (graphically) resuscitate the now 20-year-old classic that’s Half-Life 2 for modern systems, Orbifold Studios are in full steam developing Half-Life 2 RTX, with all the bells of whistles of ray-tracing, enhanced textures, realistic lightning, and more. Showcasing the prowess of Nvidia’s RTX Remix technology, the Half-Life 2 RTX demo is available free of cost for existing Half-Life 2 owners on Steam.
It’s a weird world we live in. On one end, we’re likely to see many budget RTX GPUs struggling in Half-Life 2 RTX. On the other, the 3D Phantom XP 2800 barely manages 15 FPS in the original 2004 release, provided the system doesn’t crash every five minutes or so.
In 2005, Pine Technology (now the parent company of XFX) launched the 3D Phantom 2800 XP, which was essentially a cut-down SiS 305, a 2000 offering from Silicon Integrated Systems. The add-in card is functionally no more than a display adapter, with 8MB of SDR (Synchronous DRAM), DirectX 6 support, a measly 3W rating, and fabbed on an ancient 250nm process node. The test bench features an AMD Athlon 64-based CPU, 1GB of DDR memory, and the 3D Phantom 2800 XP, all fired up on Windows XP Home 32-bit.
At 640×480 using the lowest preset, at least from the game settings, the 2800 XP managed around 10-15 FPS on average, occasionally ticking up to 30 FPS in darker environments. The YouTuber explains that Half-Life 2 tends to crash on systems with limited VRAM, and this happens on this setup every five minutes. To achieve 60 FPS with minimal crashes, the next few hours were spent meticulously tweaking every possible setting in the game’s configuration files.
Eventually, the game was made to boot up with reflections, shadows, anisotropic filtering, and antialiasing disabled, minimal textures, and DirectX 6 mode, and at an absurdly low resolution of 320×240. We advise you to watch the video to get a feel for the compromises that were made. Long story short: The game looks like jumbled wireframes and can easily be mistaken for a stickman flash game from the 2010s. Even so, the card still cannot maintain a steady 60 FPS framerate, indicated by the occasional choppiness in the video.
It’s safe to say that even decade-old mobile CPUs with integrated graphics are leagues ahead of this card. Unless you wish to get the 2800 XP for its historical value, consider getting a Kepler GT 730 or an equivalent from AMD instead.