Half-Life 2: Retro PC Time Capsule vs PlayStation 3 vs OG Xbox - Need We Say More?

[@tobreakintopieces]

The port team was part of EA Bright Light. That team also did Hasbro Family Game Night, among other things. At the time, they were on the third floor of Onslow House in Guildford, with the Harry Potter team. Criterion were (still are?) on the second floor. Three of my housemates worked in Bright Light, I was downstairs in Criterion.

[@j_c_93]

Cool, did you work on Burnout?

[@spvrda]

@@j_c_93 Sure did if he worked at Criterion while Orange Box was being ported(2007)

[@AIIEYESONME]

Sounds like you worked at Google actually.

[@tobreakintopieces]

@@j_c_93 I did, on Burnout Paradise, and then Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.

[@RoboZombie777]

Bright Light also worked on Burnout Dominator, the spinoff Burnout that came out between Revenge and Paradise which often gets overlooked, which is a shame cuz I think it had some neat ideas in there

[@Waffle4569]

Half Life 2 actually has a lot of LODs, especially for meshes that are reused a lot, they were just very hard to notice. For example, the trash can has around 6 on PC. They were much more incremental than anyone would bother to do today, and the way they were stored on disk was really chaotic, parts of lowres LODs would be used to reassemble the high LODs as a form of compression. You literally can't just directly load the highest LOD, you have to reassemble it by working your way up the LOD chain.

[@NickBaysingar]

I'm pretty sure Valve also made it so that the vast majority of the models would automatically fall back to using a simplified LoD mesh when running the game in DX7. That's probably what we're seeing with the Xbox port. Like you said, the game actually made extensive use of LoDs, and I'm sure the majority of them were produced using automated methods to save on time, which is why they often look super clumsy and weird like what DF were seeing in this video.

[@robertdosen646]

Is that why you can see everything "load" into it's high res model/texture?

[@Wogle]

This comparison of 3 different versions is really fun to see. Can we expect a Doom 3 one in the near future?

[@Wogle]

@@i3l4ckskillzz79 There's a DF Retro vid I think, but not a simultaneous playthrough. Basically curious to see a "live" side by side of the cuts to the Xbox version, and additional changes made to the BFG edition

[@SeiyaDLuffy]

Yeah, and with Resident Evil 4 too

[@Wogle]

@@notnotrom1 3: Original PC Version, the Xbox version, and the BFG Edition

[@mbsfaridi]

@@SeiyaDLuffy Yeah, would love to see GC and PS2 comparisons.

[@HeyKyle]

They literally mention making a future doom 3 video in this video lol

[@RizzyWow]

My first experience of Half-Life 2 was on Xbox, I remember buying the Official Xbox Magazine as a kid which had a special on Half-Life 2 with an awesome cover (I still have it). Then a few years later I saw the game at Comet for like £2 and I asked my dad to buy it for me and he did. What an amazing experience, it made me love games in a different way. Years later I built a PC and replayed it. This game has a special place in my heart for sure.

[@thatdognotthepuppy5809]

Ah, Comet... Simpler times. Remember Gamestation?

[@Loundsify]

Jeez comet. I used to work for them. RIP.

[@scoutbr00]

Its a shame you guys didn't touch upon the audio differences between game versions. The Xbox version ironically has the best audio despite lowest sampling due to its built in hardware audio processing. Dr. Breen's speeches in the trainstation and square sound absolutely amazing and really give you a felling of being in a huge room, with the audio echoing. The apartment sections also have phenomenal audio, as loud noises can be heard from flowing through the small hallways. I really wished someone would find a way to force or emulate these audio effects onto the PC version. The PS3 version also has some distorted voice lines (take a listen to Gman's initial speech lmao)

[@itsd0nk]

The OG Xbox had the fucking *best* discrete audio processor built into it. Halo games in glorious 5.1 all with real time audio plugin effects on every channel. Even having a super expensive sound card in your PC didn’t get you this in most PC games back then... and I had a crazy expensive sound card in my PC in those days for music editing and gaming.

[@kennymccormick8295]

A felling? FELLING? 😂😂😂😂😂😂

[@youtubeshadowbannedmylasta2629]

the fact they managed to put this on the og xbox is pretty crazy when you consider hl2 was pretty impressive when it came out.

[@NR-iw4sp]

And in the few following years, too (The Orange Box improved visuals and Episodes 1-2)!

[@kamikazemelon787]

yeah i’ve seen the xbox port before but the direct comparison here is fun to see - not only was HL2 impressive when it came out, it was also a PC melter! That Xbox port really is incredible that it even works at all

[@evil_chuck]

It wasn't "pretty" impressive... It was absolutely impressive, since until the release of Crysis (3 years later) no other game was released that broke graphical and technological limits like Half Life 2 did. Not on PC, much less on consoles.

[@miguelpereira9859]

The RAM of the Xbox was like 1/4 of the minimum required to play on PC, it's a very impressive port

[@susu5331]

This is absolutely my favorite Digital Foundry video thats > 30 min in length, the discussions and the game are both very enjoyable. You three should make more content like this!

[@Osk42]

Dude I love these retro time capsule episodes you guys do! It's amazing to see how far we've come and looking back. Some games still hold up, Half-Life 2 is one of them! More please!

[@cjaay4359]

Yes I really love Retro PC time capsule videos, we need more videos and I've watched all of the time capsule videos again and again

[@ncorcoran29]

Would hold up if they didn't abandon the story!!!

[@telefonbarmann4514]

This is my favorite DF format, with DF Direct in a close second. I think the free flow nature makes it so enjoyable.

[@offspringfan89]

@@telefonbarmann4514 My top three Digital Foundry formats: 1. DF Retro 2. Time Capsule 3. DF Direct

[@dudemanismadcool]

@@telefonbarmann4514 The best content. These DF retro time capsules are like crack for the nostalgia receptors and the name is fitting. Its like a time capsule for the feels and excitement of the day when 3D gaming was still in its relative infancy.

[@Silverturky]

honestly the water section of the game is one of my favorite parts it was so relaxing to be traversing over all that water collecting items etc. the sunset was so nice to look at even when you start going through the tunnels and have to solve that lil puzzle to get the items out of the basket. so good.. alright well... I guess I'm playing the game over tonight

[@jqwright28]

I know people love breakdowns and testing of new games' performances but this kind of thing is your all's best content. Great video!

[@Lloyd_Meadhbh]

My first sustained experience of HL2 was the XBox version, and, while I recognised it wasn't running as smoothly as it did on my friends' PCs, I was really stoked to be able to play it at all.

[@quagthias]

I was a PS2 and GCN owner when I saw the 2003 E3 demo for Half-Life 2. It blew my mind so much that I bought an Xbox just to play it (my family did not have a PC other than an old iMac) Little did I know I'd be playing it at like 15 FPS but I still loved it.

[@Loundsify]

Can confirm playing Xbox version in 2024 it holds up remarkably well.

[@PikaStu666]

You've inspired me to fire up Orange Box on my Series X. Such a timeless, classic game. I love the introduction to the city, the bleak Eastern European design. I also love the two vehicle sections in the game, exploring off the beaten track, every nook and cranny of the map had a story to tell. It's funny that Valve disliked the PS3 so much around the time of Orange Box, yet were happy to release Portal 2 on Sony's console and give everyone a free Steam code. I wonder how much money Sony slipped Gabe for that change of heart ;)

[@danielgomez7236]

Well it was not about money of course, Sony provided full support for Valve games and Gabe finally changed his mind

[@PikaStu666]

@@danielgomez7236 yeah of course it wasn’t about money 😉

[@parazels83]

It's not funny. Funny is that Portal 2 was one of rare games which ran better on PS3, than Xbox360.

[@alex.starostin]

it's a shame that Half life 2 on Series didn't get fps boosted and still runs at 30fps..

[@DP12321]

@@alex.starostin And now it's set to be delisted in a few days. 😔

[@Entropic_Alloy]

That quote from Gabe is hilarious considering how a few years later they were very buddy buddy with Sony for the release of Portal 2. I mean if you bought the PS3 version of the game, you got a free copy of the Steam version.

[@cakeisamadeupdrug6134]

Giving away a copy for a competing platform doesn't seem very "buddy buddy"

[@MasterF18]

@@cakeisamadeupdrug6134 The free copy was given away as an incentive for cross platform co-op between PS3 and Steam, which was novel at the time.

[@Clay3613]

Never doubt Mark Cerny's dark powers.

[@kyle52905]

To be fair to Gabe the PS3 must have been a nightmare to develop on I'm the early days. I kinda respect him having the balls to point out how ridiculous cell was. By the time portal 2 came out libraries were more usable on PS3 so Gabe probably was more okay with working on it by then and multi plat was basically the standard.

[@alan_7390]

Gabe always showing why he deserved to be the CEO spreading his knowledge on us.

[@wallcat3199]

It looks like their process of lowering the polygon count is similar to the "decimate" tool in Blender. You essentially move a slider and it starts to combine vertices together.

[@flioink]

Yes, it's probably a feature in the engine. Unreal Engine has the same thing where it auto-generates LODs for you and the results aren't always pretty.

[@ilbroducciore]

I wonder if models for things like cylindrical objects are stored as they minimal mathematical representations (radius + height in the cylinder’s case), and then generating their actual polygonal models is a post-process out of that data? You can then choose polygonal density dynamically.

[@TheScarletKing]

Decimate is better suited to high-poly meshes. Even Simplygon's system - which Unreal utilizes - is terrible at generating coherent super low-poly LODs, and has only been heavily leaned on in the last couple years. LODs were authored manually for the longest time.

[@TheScarletKing]

@@ilbroducciore Not possible for the vast majority of games as the faces of the object still need to be "unwrapped" to map textures onto them, and they're a poor fit for real-time work, though in a sense this is done in CAD. Collision primitives however utilize spheres, capsules, and boxes which are incomparably more efficient to custom mesh colliders as it just involves a raycasting against a mathematical representation of the primitive collider instead of each triangle on the custom collider.

[@ilbroducciore]

@@TheScarletKing sorry, to clarify, I wasn’t suggesting that this was done in-engine, rather by 3D modeling sw before model export. So no real-time requirement here. But I can see how texture mapping can be a complicating factor here. (FWIW: I’m a SWE with almost no graphics background)

[@R3AL-AIM]

My first time playing this was actually on the original Xbox. It was amazing to me back then. I later watched my friend's dad play it on PC and after Garry's Mod came out, I had to get one and join Steam myself! I'm excited to watch this.

[@j_c_93]

I came out of this seriously impressed with the Xbox version. I thought it looked damn good for what it is. If I played this back in the day, I would have thought it was great compared to other Xbox titles.

[@AvithOrtega]

Yep, this is how I first met Half Life 2 and I remember playing it many many times, such a great game.

[@XWXS2]

Still have my original Xbox still have my copy of hl2 there was nothing like it at the time for consoles. Even played it again just for the nostalgia the feeling of that og Xbox man there was something special about that console.

[@Palendrome]

I remember going into HL2 on xbox knowing nothing about Half-Life.... one of the top game experiences ever. It felt so immersive. I spent hours in the apartments stacking up all the props from the intro level to block civil protection from killing the civilians. Everything about it felt so immersive, it blew me away.

[@R3AL-AIM]

@@Palendrome pretty much the same :) I have this port to thank for introducing me to Valve and the Source engine. Now I've been on PC pretty much full time for the better part of 10 years or so lol I honestly don't remember it's been so long

[@moncho_mx]

This video fills me with joy because the OG Xbox "slideshow" version was the first time I played HL2, it blew my mind even in its choppy state, and by the end of 2005 you could play Doom 3, HL2 and Halo 2 all on the same system! the OG Xbox was a great console for sure :D

[@davidrenton]

originally got it for my dad , because it had a DVD player in it, my Dad (he would have been 60 ish) at the time ended up getting around a 1000 + games for OG Xbox and 360.

[@wile123456]

Portal 2 source engine on PS3 and orange box PS3 is such a big jump in performance its insane. It's clear the PS3 version only uses the single cpu core and the RSX for all its rendering. No SPU's even touched

[@DonkeyRhubarb21]

I had this on a 7800GT. Some of the best game experiences of my life. Half Life 2 and its associated online games gave so much.

[@Treebsquire]

Half Life 2 recently had a complete VR conversion mod and it's absolutely awesome! PLays like a native VR game and it even has full steam worskhop support for mods.

[@wayn3h]

Yep it's absolutely fantastic. Probably one of the definitive VR experiences in my humble opinion.

[@lucodeath]

HL 1 had a vr mod which is a bit of a mess so I was pleasantly surprised by HL2 vr.

[@CricetoFunni]

I'm so glad I don't have motion sickness for the airboat section

[@mariokart8054]

@@lucodeath Really! I had trouble with climbing ladders and I didn't like the new gun models, but i thought half life VR was solid everywhere else, especially on my quest.

[@steel5897]

It's great, but the long boat sections, which were mildly annoying in flatscreen, are potentially vomit inducing nonsense in VR.

[@mandrews6282]

Hearing the joy of you guys exploring this one is making me want to play it all over again.

[@MKR3238]

if you want to experience it again, but slightly better check out hl2 update + mmod (for improved gunplay)

[@godonomas]

In an alternate universe Gordon, Barney, and Kleiner are all playing Digital Foundry 2.

[@lethal_guitar]

"If people are still watching" - I watched it all the way to the end! These laid-back "just hanging out and playing" type videos are some of my favorite DF content!

[@antivanti]

Not sure if it really counts as planar reflections but having additional mirrored geometry to simulate reflections was done even on the original PlayStation. I remember Warhawk, a launch game iirc, used it for the water in the canyon

[@RyanCoomer]

I'm a janitor at a school and after hours I'll place lettuce heads in random lockers so the next day there is lettuce in a locker

[@theengineer-dellconagher]

keep it up, doc! good stuff

[@TheWh1teL1ght]

Wow that's cool

[@-redacted_by_youtube]

Dad? Is that you?

[@WigneyR]

Locker lettuce you could call it

[@KrissFliss]

Do you by any chance know a James Lancaster?

[@dennisjassmann7584]

Keep in mind the PS2 struggled to run Half Life 1 and the Xbox actually somewhat ran Half Life 2, that alone is really impressive and shows how much more powerful the OG Xbox was

[@Stinger2578]

One strong memory of playing this in November of 2004 was having my first experience with motion sickness from an FPS game. Water Hazard with what would have been high settings on my PC back then couldn't maintain the smooth framerate when it went from the tunnel to the first open area. Ended up with some nausea and slight headache until I figured out to lower details.

[@slippynipz]

What a damn bone-chilling intro. Fantastic game, cant believe it's been almost 20 years...

[@cjaay4359]

man i really love Retro time capsule videos we need more time capsule videos I've watched all of the time capsule videos again and again and i know its really hard and time consuming to make these type of videos so thank you Alex and DF team really appreciate this :)

[@DNFHistory]

A Xbox 360 version running on Series X at 2160p comparison would have been fun too!

[@TSL73]

Recently beat it that way! Was very cool to play it on a current gen console.

[@mikem2253]

@@TSL73 How did you get it? I do not see it on the Xbox store no more.

[@Minnevan]

@@mikem2253the orange box is the only way I think, if it’s not available digitally then you’ll have to hunt down a physical copy

[@mrbrookeyoung]

@@Minnevan Isn't it locked at 30 though?

[@RalfKraus]

Yes the Orange Box Version on SERIES X is awesome!

[@-TriP-]

Back then I had a P4 2.8GHz/HT with 512MB of RDRAM and a Radeon 9800pro ... ran great!

[@SapoArdente]

You should do a comparison between the different versions of Resident Evil 4, there are significant diferences between GC and PS2.

[@EndlessFunctionality]

Oh man that PS2. The audio was so degraded it sounded like having wax paper over my speakers.

[@WilfredBrimleyGaming]

Original xbox version was played on a CRT by most people like myself. I played it on a 32 inch 4:3 with component cables. It made games like that look so much better than modern flat panels

[@ninjapants7688]

What is great about the XBox version is Valve actually incorporated a lot of things they learned about making that port into the PC version, lots of optimisations to CPU usage and such were added to new builds that they took away from the project.

[@miketava]

One thing not being properly accounted for in this comparison was that for the time, the Xbox version would've likely been played on a CRT TV, getting you a free pass of pseudo AA, smoothing out those rough edges.

[@Edwins1984]

Never stop doing these kind of video's guys! Amazing stuff.

[@Beastw1ck]

As someone who was there when HL2 released, I’m amazed and delighted that it remains relevant this far into the future.

[@JANER64]

Same here....I started off with HL1 ofc , 1999, one year after it's release.

[@flush_entity]

same! i even tried the leak version. But didnt play the game (couldnt really lol) just messed with the physics, which at the time, blew my friggin mind. Still does! Not many games has physics you can play with

[@MrStrangermoon]

the drone idea definlty mostly happen on real world but they should do the robot dogs in game back then.

[@saricubra2867]

@@flush_entity Crysis is a good sucessor to Half Life 2 (besides Alyx obviously). I had a lot of fun.

[@miguelpereira9859]

​@@saricubra2867You can tell the HL influence in Crysis, like in the last level where you are walking through the aircraft carrier

[@Livo33]

1:03:20 You can actually attach to ladders in HL2 by simply facing them and then pressing E: when you do this, you can climb them but cannot fall off or leave them until you press E again. You can also use the ladders the old fashioned "run up or down and try not to fall off" way as well.

[@QuestionBlockGaming]

Early on in this video you quoted the system requirements for HL2; but you took the ones from the steam page, not from the back of the box! The steam page is for when the games got updated with the Orange Box engine and brought up to spec for that; but the original system requirements were a 1.2ghz Pentium 3 and 256MB of RAM! The original Xbox being able to squeeze the entire game onto 64MB of ram is really impressive but the performance gap between 1.0 HL2 and the orange box HL2 is pretty immense and is worth stating.

[@chrisrichfield8906]

I wonder if the game would perform better with the 128mb ram mod. Probably not without some hacking of the game but I'm still curious.

[@Loundsify]

​@@chrisrichfield8906probably not as the game will be coded to only use the set pool of memory. All the levels are split up even further than pc probably 3x as many load points but they load fairly quick off dvd around 15s, copying to HDD on Xbox it can do loads in around 7s.

[@forresthunter1483]

I first played this game on the Xbox, and was amazed at how it just seemed like the system was hanging on for dear life while running it. I loved it for what it was and knew that, one day, I'd be playing a much better version on the next gen consoles. Of course, I got a PS3, so...

[@Clay3613]

The PS3 version was fine though, look at all the added effects and not looking like ragged torn paper!

[@cellspeed8682]

@@Clay3613 Exactly. Also loading times are not much of an issue if you play at least halfway decent. Rich on the other side... oh boy...

[@silveriosierra6405]

You guys are awesome! I was grinning when Rich needed explanation about the blue ball reference :) I am jealous of how you guys make a living but also happy to see you guys doing what you love. Keep in coming Digital Foundry.

[@heemeshj9394]

The comment at 46 minutes around commanding a vehicle, being able to jump out and explore, is exactly what I loved Metro Exodus for.

[@WAstEDxLaMA]

I love these videos and I love these three guys! It’s like meeting up with old friends :) Thanks guys

[@bellotriggerfish]

Thank you for this bit of retro video. You guys make these clips very much fun to watch. Sorry Rich had a hard time with the PS3 version. One point to consider is that any OG Xbox was probably hooked up to a standard tube TV of the day. And this might have looked really good on a tube TV with its 480i NTSC output. One other thing to note regarding the PS3 version vs the Xbox 360 version: the PS3 did not have DD5.1 Live which the 360 version did have. The only way to get surround from the PS3 version was to set it to 5.1 PCM or 7.1 PCM which was only possible through HDMI and not every receiver had that. Many surround receivers still had only an optical input or a coax input for digital surround, and so not having that DD5.1 was kinda sucky. Whoever ported the game either completely missed this important audio feature, or didn't know how to make it work. Anyway, more vids like this please 🙂

[@Loundsify]

Apparently EA UK worked on the PS3 and the team was around 7 people working on the port. So probably not the teams fault they were so under funded in terms of size and resources. We should probably be thankful the PS3 version even came to be.

[@RichieMyers12]

My first experience with HL2 was on the OG XBox. I loved every second of it.

[@CodyHimselfXI]

The Xbox demo disc for Half-Life2 was my first experience with this game. I played through the entire thing in one weekend when my Dad rented the game for me from Blockbuster, lol! 3 years later my grandpa bought me a gaming Acer laptop and I was finally able to run the game at max settings, 60 fps. Regardless, I must say, the Xbox version was a phenomenal port.

[@sumitupadhayay2270]

Just installed it after ages and playing it on my 4k set with dldsr and it still holds up considering it's suchhhh an old game. An absolute classic

[@CrispyChicken44]

This video is so trippy to me, I'm so happy and thankful you guys made this. I first played Half-Life 2 on PC when it first came out and played the hell out of it. Years later I only had an Xbox and wanted to replay HL2 so I played that version of the game and boy the differences were wild. It never occurred to me *why* the changes needed to be made because I didn't know what I do now. Thank you.

[@dan_loeb]

wikipedia says EA Bright Light (formerly EA UK) ported it. the source is an old news article with Doug Lombardi explaining the delay of the ps3 version. he directly says EA UK was handling the port.

[@brettlivingston595]

"Leon doesn't know how to enter or exit houses properly." - digital foundry

[@QuantumAssassin]

These comparisons are very interesting to see how far tech has come. Thanks for putting this together guys.

[@TheGatorMan]

(My brain is telling me that this might be something that I will end up regret doing, but here goes anyway!) I was one of the engineers that worked on the PS3 port of the The Orange Box. And for some reason I have decided that KZbin is the best way to try to clear up some mis-truths about the product, and to give some insight into what happened with it. As a disclaimer, these are my views only and I do not speak for anyone else. Everything I say is from my perspective only, others on the team may see things differently. Having said that, I will try to be as objective as possible. Also, posting as a thread as I think there's a character limit per comment.

[@TheGatorMan]

Starting with correcting the mis-truths: Firstly, as asked in the video and somewhat answered (incorrectly) by another commenter (who I do know and worked with at Criterion), the best answer for what team worked on the port was EA UK. The name Bright Light did not exist at the start of the project. EA UK was made up of multiple teams, one of which was the Harry Potter team, another was a PSP team, and then there was us. The previous project we (our team) worked on was a port of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat from the OG Xbox to the 360. Half the development was done in Chertsey, EA UK's original studio location (side fun fact, the building was used in Inception. The part where the Joseph Gordon-Levitt character was teaching the Elliot Page character about the stairs). The other half of the development was done in Guildford, where we moved into the same building as Criterion. It was at this point where EA UK was renamed to Bright Light, as part of a studio branding change into the new label system that John Riccitiello implemented as he just became CEO. Bright Light consisted of the the Harry Potter team and what ended up being the Wii team from the PSP team. The studio was part of the EA Casual label. A game like The Orange Box, however, did not fit under Casual label and was put as part of the EA Games label, which is what Criterion were under. So, technically, by the time the game shipped, we were part of Criterion as Fiona Sperry (Criterion GM) was overseeing the project. TL;DR? We were essentially our own thing.

[@TheGatorMan]

Secondly, regarding SPU usage. I think this was stated in the video, but there was a general impression that the game did not use the SPUs. This is FALSE. The game very much did use SPUs. We would never have achieved the shipping frame rate at all if this was not the case. I, in fact, wrote one of the most important SPU programs of the game in which the GPU command buffer generation was all done on SPU. This was done fairly late in the project and was technically risky, but it gave the biggest CPU perf boost out everything we did to get the game running at 30 fps. We also had various other SPU programs running, but I'll be honest, I don't recall what each of them did as they were written by other engineers. My memory is a bit hazy. Main point, though, is that the SPUs were used. I am not sure where/how this rumour was started. I just know I have seen it brought up multiple times.

[@TheGatorMan]

Lastly, the image blur. Someone in the video almost got it correct when they mentioned quincunx, which is a special texture sampling mode. Not quite the right answer, but on the right track. This issue was down to the 2xMSAA used and how the downsampling resolve was done. MSAA on the PS3 had to be setup and performed manually. This includes enabling the feature, setting up the correct frame buffer sizes, and the resolving the buffer to show on screen. For 2xMSAA, you render at a width twice the size of the final output size. The game shipped at 1280x720, so the 2xMSAA buffer would be 2560x720. You then have to "resolve" back to 1280x720, which is combining the 2 pixels in the width into 1 pixel. How you combine the two pixels determined the final output. Sony's advice is to use the Quincunx texture filtering. However, this is not what we used. We used bilinear filtering. And that's the reason why the blur occurred, because bilinear filtering takes vertical pixels into account when downsampling, thus blurring the image. So, why did it ship like this? Well, unknown to the public, we actually had 4xMSAA running for the longest of times. This produced a very clean image and the aliasing was reduced significantly. For 4xMSAA, you render into a 2 * width and 2 * height buffer. So, 2560x1440. You then resolve that back to 1280x720. That is where you use bilinear filtering to combine 4 pixels into 1. Then why didn't we ship with 4xMSAA? Two reasons: memory and GPU time. MSAA causes a GPU hit. For the most part, the game was never GPU bound. Valve's shaders were pretty optimised and worked fairly well on the RSX. However, MSAA would push the GPU in some areas, especially on Ep2. Then there's the memory. Having a 2560x1440 intermediate buffer used 14mb of VRAM. The PS3 had the added complexity of split memory of 256mb system memory and 256gb of VRAM. However, Sony also reserved a good chunk of both system memory and VRAM for OS purposes. Meaning we get way less memory than the 360. These frame buffers can only be on VRAM as rendering to/from system memory was _very_ slow. Same goes for all GPU resources. When you're running out of memory and are GPU bound, something had to give. Switching to 2xMSAA saved an instant 7mb and reduced the GPU time. The 2xMSAA switch was done very late, meaning there was no time to fix the resolve part as it ended up using the same shader as the 4xMSAA resolve using bilinear filtering. So, the game shipped with the blur. I wasn't happy about it, but we didn't have a choice. The really sad part, though, was once the game went gold and shipped, we end up with some downtime. In that time I experimented with some changes that made better use of Z culling (hardware feature that prevents pixels from being shaded if not visible due something rendered in front). This fixed the GPU issues that we were seeing on Ep2 with 4xMSAA. Also, Sony released a new SDK (these are timed with firmware updates) that reduced the amount of VRAM memory they reserved for the OS by 10mb, meaning we would have had enough for the 4xMSAA buffer. If we just waited slightly longer, the game could have shipped with 4xMSAA. All was not lost, the game would run with 4xMSAA if you ran in SD. If you do, you'll see there's a clean image with no blur, and a visual image far better than the 360, albeit in SD. I'll touch upon why the game wasn't patched later on.

[@TheGatorMan]

If you're still with me after all that, next part is regarding the development itself and difficulties in porting the game to the PS3.

[@TheGatorMan]

The main problem that we ran into, and I don't really think this will really surprise anyone, is that the Source engine was very much designed around the PC and the PC architecture of that day. When HL2 first came out, it was pretty much single threaded. But with the release of the 360, PS3, and newer PCs at that time, multithreading was all the rage. However, the multithreading design pattern that Valve adopted was the old school (relative to today, but very much how people did it in those days) idea of moving whole sub-systems off onto another thread, and protect the data that is shared between the threads. At the time, this is how people knew how to use MT. For PCs with multiple core/hardware threads and the 360, this worked great. For the PS3, however, this MT model does not translate well as it only had 2 hardware threads on the PPU and the SPUs, only of which were 5 available (yes, that's right. 5. Not 6, as reported by some people (like Digital Foundry) have stated. 1 was disabled for yield reasons, 1 was for security, and 1 was for the OS. However, the OS doesn't use it all the time, so you could _potentially_ use it. At least this was true at the time for this game. I don't recall Sony freeing it up entirely. Anyway, I digress!). The SPUs are not designed to be generic processor like the PPU (main CELL CPU) or the 360/PC CPUs. The best way to utilise the SPUs was to organise your data into a streamable block, the SPU will then stream in chunks of that data, process it, and then transfer the results elsewhere. The registers in there were all vector based. So, the best type of processing would be for vector type data. It could run scaler code, but it was best used for vectors. A simple and naive example would be using it for ray-triangle collision detection, in which the SPU can stream in the triangle vertices of a collision mesh, perform the ray test with all of them, and then stream back the results. If the data can be broken down into multiple chunks, you could then use multiple SPUs to process that data, thus cutting down the time further. This pattern is the essence of the job system that most games now use, as it scales to any architecture. Personal thought here, but when I keep hearing Gabe's comment (as referenced in this video) that the PS3 was a waste of time, I can't help but think he couldn't be anymore wrong as most game engines base their entire MT model on what the PS3 forced people to do. But why didn't we do this? It would have meant some serious refactoring of the Source engine code as their systems and the data they used/created was not set up anywhere near like this. Our team size was pretty small, about 10-15 people. And there was only a core 6-7 of us that did the majority of the porting, in just over a year. Valve had worked on this engine for 10 years+ in that time. There was no way we could learn the entirety of the engine enough to have made major refactors better suited to the PS3 that didn't introduce major bugs. We were also learning the PS3 at the same time as well. The other main issue was that Valve were actively developing at the same time we were porting. And Valve are a team that aren't afraid to do sweeping changes! There were several occasions in which would start to get a hang of the engine and performance, but then an update from Valve would either break things, reduce performance, or cause us to relearn a system. This would also cause us to redo work that we had already done. We were constantly having the rug pulled under from us, which is why the PS3 version ended up delayed as we needed a stable codebase to work from. Lastly, when we started the port, I recall the intention was just to port HL2, Ep1, and Ep2. However, we then learnt about the The Orange Box bundle from the public statement! Meaning we learnt that we had to get Portal and TF2 working as well at the same as the rest of the world did.

[@Batistadx4]

These are awesome!! Honestly, I'm a huge nerd for these kind of time capsules of redesigning games to run better on weaker hardware that was prevalent at the time, I feel like you could make an entire channel dedicated to looking at ports like this, the PS2/Dreamcast Half-life 1 ports, the Xbox Counter-Strike ports, etc... PSP ports of PS2/PS3 games would also be amazing for that purpose, like the PSP port of Star Wars Battlefront 2!

[@Kiversth]

I'm one of the mad men who played HL2 on the OG Xbox, and finished it. My pc could barely boot the game up as it was mainly a cheap laptop for schoolwork. Aaah, memories.

[@aggies11]

Played this on PC at launch, with only 256MB of ram, and the loading was pretty much as bad as PSTripple, source frequent loading screens were murder. Enough that it forced me to upgrade to 512MB a week later. Physics frame drops were the norm also, the audio distortion/stutter that would happen on physics explosions became part of my head cannon for the game. Feels weird not having it replaying on a Modern system.

[@mrchiledonut]

I was super excited about Half-Life 2 and played a little bit of it on PC around release via demo and at a friend's house, but my PC was not good. It wasn't until Christmas 05 when I got it as a present on Xbox, and at the time, I still fell in love with it. This was at a time just before we started jumping into HD TVs, and I was using a Samsung GXE1395. A small CRT screen surrounded by speakers, but it was enough to fully immerse me into Half-Life 2. Honestly, while I still like Half-Life 2, the different (and technically much better) versions never matched my first full impression of the game on Xbox. I played it again on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 07 and just wasn't as into it. Of course, I've also played it through on PC many times since. I wish they could have added 60fps on XSX along with the 4k. Half-Life 2 is one of those games that, like many I'm sure, I play at least once a year for a bit. Edit - Oh! And I hope Digital Foundry can get their hands on the Dead Space remake early and post their findings on PS5 vs. Xbox Series X, ray-traced 30fps vs. 60fps. Edit 2 - Playing Half-Life 2 on Series X right now (seems I went through it back in May of last year). There are probably mods out there, but I've been thinking about a remake/sequel and honestly, right now I'd love to just see a faithful recreation of it with high-resolution textures and full ray tracing. I love the art style and still think it looks good, but some modern touch-ups would be... cool, for lack of a better word. It'd just be nice.

[@simonuk1213]

Was playing The Orange Box on Series X a couple months ago and was really impressed with how good it looked.

[@mrbrookeyoung]

Wish it wasn't locked to 30fps

[@Clutch4IceCream]

@@mrbrookeyoung it’s not, Xbox’s high frame rate mode pushes it to 60fps

[@EndlessFunctionality]

@@Clutch4IceCream That's good to hear it got and FPS. I'll have to pull my copy out.

[@TechnicolorTube]

@@Clutch4IceCream Its not 60fps. There is no FPS Boost for Orange Box on Series X/S. I am playing it right now and its 30 fps.

[@TechnicolorTube]

@@EndlessFunctionality I'm playing Half Life 2 (Orange Box) on my Series X right now and its 30 fps. No FPS Boost for Orange Box. That person must be mistaken.

[@chrisvillan88]

The doors in the OG xbox version still look better than the infamous door in FF7 Remake on PS4

[@Rhysdoesletsplays]

I really want to see Half Life 2 on Nintendo Switch now. I think it could probably run close to a locked 60 at 720p at least.

[@Loundsify]

Probably could run at 1080p judging from Portal 2 on Switch.

[@detonator620]

What a beautiful game this is! Remember playing Half Life 2 in 2004 on my then high end GPU ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and was blown away by graphics it delivered! I also take a picture of almost every moment of the game saved them on my PC and my HDD was completely filled up with HL2's beautiful screenshots! What a great time it was back then...

[@MarcKent-wr1rq]

TIL Half Life 2 was released on OG Xbox... mind = blown!

[@MiniBeas]

I love these Time Capsule episodes. Chronicles of Riddick or Starcraft 64 vs the PC port.

[@lordcustard-smythe-smith9153]

Still playing HL2 in 3d nvidia vision with 3 screens, and still looks fantastic. There is an upgraded graphics version on Steam available from a 3rd party developer.

[@henriqueaugustus1761]

I remember those days. 3d gaming was sick. I loved Burnout Paradise on 3d. It was so intense.

[@Spyder1246]

My first full playthrough was on the original Xbox, & this game completely blew me away. It's still my favorite first person shooter ever made.

[@Slowbuilderchallenge]

Awesome seeing you guys cover the og xbox version finally. Do you think you'll cover Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay on og xbox? I remember one of you offhand mentioning the dynamic res system in that game a while ago...

[@Wheagg]

11:41 anything that can move doesn't block line of sight in Source, therefore that hallway is drawn from that foyer because you can see it through the doors. Xbox removing those doors stops it from rendering that hallway

[@TheLucasbuck]

These are my favourite DF videos. Great work as always.

[@enjoylife6374]

one thing i notice now is how much SLOWER is moving speed in hl2 compared to hl

[@glox023]

Amazing video. Please have more Rich in future episodes, he's hilarious to me.

[@viktorjanosi6888]

We need Mass Effect 1 DF Retro with some LE1 comparation.

[@HunterTinsley]

51:00 - the fact that Valve helped the Black Mesa team, and sell that game on steam makes me pretty confident that they have no plans to remake HL. Also, have you guys play the Dr. Beef HL1 VR mod?

[@5punkybob]

Just think… the OG Xbox ran doom 3 also.. Such a good machine.

[@kieran.grant_]

HL2 will always hold a special place in my heart, as it is one of the first "real games" I ever played. Back in middle school, on a terrible hand-me-down laptop, the orange box was that perfect combination of "actually runs" and "costs like $5". Half life, Portal, and their respective sequels were all I had to play for a good year or so, and I loved every second of them.

[@GodsSoldier2]

This game is the reason why I explore every corner of every game I play. The game that started it all

[@Foxtrop13]

20:55 the IK animations seems to work better on the xbox version? the retargeting on the turn seems harsh on the xp version

[@OwtDaftUK]

I don't see how Valve thought Sony lost the plot with PS3. PS2 wasn't known for been developer friendly either.

[@xBINARYGODx]

Fences blocking you from going over a few steps is because they likely removed something you would only see removed if you walked a few steps over - to save on memory.

[@robsondaniel5537]

"Look: There's a representation of the frame time graph of the PS3 here" really got me

[@cellspeed8682]

Yeah, and it was ported from the OG Xbox version. 😂

[@Loundsify]

​@@cellspeed8682it wasn't it was ported from the original steam version, a UK dev who worked on it said it was the PC version ported to run on PS3 environment.

[@TranCeFORM3R]

Played the orange box on ps3 when it was released finished Half life 2 Episode 2 and Portal despite the performance issues which I did not care at the time. Team fortress 2 online was my first online game with community. It was a small community on ps3, but the people I played with were real and it was so much fun to play, PlayStation network helped with that. Soo many game nights 2 fort see the same players it was tight nit. So many happy memories

[@dakotadeepdisaster106]

This is a delightful episode! A load of insightful information, a bit of nostalgia and a bit of laughs. It was a pleasant, even calming, experience for me

[@rometherevenant8749]

Gawd I love the half life series. I wish I can go back in time to experience Half Life 2 for the first time. I remember watching Xplay and being blown away when it was first shown off at E3.

[@edulinares7152]

I've played the whole Orange Box collection on ps3 and had a great time. It was considered a terrible port, and it had obvious issues like audio glitches throughout. Still, it was perfectly playable and the games are excellent. It's maybe not ideal, but it wasn't nearly as bad as people who never played it made it seem.

[@sebastiankulche]

I rather play HL2 on PS3 than the OG Xbox, thats for sure.

[@AnnDVine]

I love this! Good banter, fascinating comparisons, comfortable vibes, it's just nice!

[@Breyzipp]

Loved that “Gabe was right” at the very end. 😂 Awesome playthrough guys, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this as HL2 is one of my favourite games of all times

[@casedistorted]

I like these episodes. Perfect timing because I just installed the ORIGINAL launch CE version of Half Life 2 on my Pc, the version I remember playing when it came out in 2004 and my dad and I both played on his gaming Pc. God rest his soul, he passed in August 2022. Before he died maybe a year prior he asked me “hey do you remember what that game with all the physics puzzles was called we both played back in the day?” I told him What.. Half Life 2?? I couldn’t believe he had forgotten the name of it but yeah, I remember he was so blown away by it. I think I was more blown away by Half Life 1 on our PC when that first came out.

[@ravajbains8672]

OG Xbox Port is nothing less than phenomenal considering the hardware...

[@Jiraiya_9142]

HL2 and offshoots like CSC/DOD were my favorite games to play on PC in middle/high school. Back then I was blown away by the detail and level design

[@carlharrison3637]

I loved my ps3, its what got me buying the ps4 - originally I was an xbox user, OG and then 360 but that died on me.... red ring , microsoft pissed me about so I ended up getting the ps3 - had some great, great games and was blown away compared to how things looked on the 360. Might have been a nightmare for the developers, but from what I remember, the games were fab.

[@Loundsify]

Infamous, Killzone, resistance, uncharted all good series on the triple

[@femto8402]

Most games looked way worse on ps3 compared to 360 tho

[@clausius5120]

Oh man I f*ing love these PC Time capsule videos Alex. Please keep pushing them big time. Such a treat.

[@lukeo5908]

I died at John’s mention of ‘Xbox exclusive loading screens’ 🤣 Love this content, keep up the great work team!

[@UPHENOS]

I remember playing it back in '04 on the OG XBOX, such an amazing game! It was one of the many excellent ports Microsoft's console had from PC and quite an impressive one for the time. After that I replayed it on my XBOX360 along with the other orange box games. Those were the days man!

[@mattcy6591]

Richard left the chat...

[@DisturbedbyDeth]

The OG Xbox version was actually my first experience with the game - my family only had a really old PC at the time that could barely play games. It still blew me away graphically back in the day but then that was the system I was used to.

[@JamesSturges]

11:22: I’d have to imagine the missing door on Xbox is to prevent a scenario where the player is looking through both that door and the door to outside, potentially rendering more geometry than the poor old Box could render.

[@Hvojnyj]

guys I so love your videos like these one because every time it feels like I'm hanging with my friends in early 00's with a new game

[@azazelleblack]

This has been the most interesting retro time capsule video to date because of the platforms you picked. It's absolutely amazing what they achieved on the Xbox given its meager specifications, and the PS3 version is fascinatingly bad, but the Orange Box engine upgrades are fascinating to see in comparison to the original PC version. Kudos!

[@ashleythomas4112]

Not all of the PS3 version is fascinatingly bad, mostly performance in certain areas.

[@formulajuan5762]

More videos of the three of you playing games together please, these videos rock :)

[@razvanendl9900]

Ok but why not xbox 360 on the orange box?

[@Yodagamer1]

ps3 is more fun to watch.

[@Al-dv1zj]

Great vid!! So much work has been put into making this xbox conversion, really awesome stuff. 1 thing I always wondered about hl2: if memory serves, in the early trailers it haD dynamic lightmaps for effects like gunshot flashes illuminating the environmental textures. In the final game only some objects like boxes would get lit, but not the walls or ground textures for example. I wonder why those were cut

[@gamerxt333]

Probably performance requirements would be too high, although they could of kept this as an option I guess, especially now. MMod can also do that though I think...

[@JulianCallan]

The original Xbox version is a masterpiece of porting.

[@orijimi]

Partly because it still has the pistol charge exploit.

[@Parker--]

Agreed. It was excellent and I would bet played as well as it did on PC for those without a proper gaming PC (ie. without a video card).

[@sebastiankulche]

I have to disagree. The game is pretty much unenjoyable in that state.