Thread 721115932

What was PC gaming like in 2005

kinda gay tbqh

Everything was pre-built and clunky and we just played RuneScape in a shitty web browser.

>>721115932 (OP)
they were basically just counter strike/rts machines, pc gaming only really got good in the 2010s

world of warcraft
warcraft 3
diablo 2

>>721115932 (OP)
Actually distinct from console gaming, for starters.

PC would either
>get the best version of a game (Doom 3, Half Life 2, Oblivion/Morrowind)
>not get games at all, japs used to completely ignore PC
>get a few exclusives, mainly RTS, 4X or WRPG
>hardware wasn't so expensive if you had a job, Video card market wasn't a monopoly (Nvidia vs ATI)

>>721115932 (OP)
kinda ugly kinda ugly ugly threatening every body while you are in the bottom on the food chain chain and uh while every body is disgusted by your ugly ugly face and uh and you are threatening every body while you are more uglier then every body and uh and uh and that is not how you be better then every body and uh and uh you are just ugly and annoying and and not better then any body just some ugly ugly freak that stays home all day trying to trick people that don’t know and uh annduh and uh and uh

>>721116508
how wrong you are
voodoos still were found in the wild, the terrible duopoly that we now enjoy didn't exist
lots of hardware to choose from, some good, some terrible
every few months a new game would come out
DX9 was still pretty new and would look over nearly a decade of great times
lan parties were still a thing, because people actually had friends
porn hadn't yet rotted everyones brain
gacha didn't exist
indians and chinese weren't on the internet in any real numbers yet
it was pretty good times

>>721116153
>>721116508

lmao these retards

the golden era of pc gaming was the late 90s to early 2000s

Back when AGP ment something else.

>>721115932 (OP)
Still really expensive and kind of shitty. There was all kinds of stupid bullshit that everyone just put up with. Like how widescreen monitors were coming into fashion, but games like BF2 didn't support them and actively decried widescreen as cheating.

>>721115932 (OP)
We had fun games.

>>721115932 (OP)
You upgraded your computer every year instead of 6.

>>721116998
The early 2000s was when shit started to suck though. The OG Xbox came on the scene and traditional PC developers started making games targeting it instead. Games like Deus Ex and Thief and TES were dumbed down for console audiences. Other games like Unreal Championship were console exclusive. Starforce and other harebrained DRM schemes were coming into existence, and physical was on the decline, but Steam was still in its early stages as a digital distribution platform (and everyone hated it). I would argue that the early 360 era was the darkest day in PC gaming history, but things were getting bad for a few years prior.

>>721115932 (OP)
Prior to it I remember having a lot of prebuilt shit, was pretty mind blowing upgrading things bit by bit as opposed to now where it seems you can get away with the same build for 5 years

>>721115932 (OP)
i put together my first computer in like 04/05 as a dumb teenager
it was pretty epic, there were a lot of interesting FPS games and especially FEAR which is my favourite FPS campaign
as a horny teenager i also liked downloading random eroge... the freedom of PC was and still is the greatest appeal

>>721117532
>I would argue that the early 360 era was the darkest day in PC gaming history, but things were getting bad for a few years prior.

What was the 360 era like for PC gaming?

>>721117561
>>721117365
>every time there's an increase in GPU prices and /v/ is convinced that PC gaming is dead forever
They really don't know good they have it.

>>721117561
I don't think I ever got into custom PCs until later, but I do remember a lot of the gaming magazines having reviews for components and pre-builts. But also, PC building seemed like a total clusterfuck at that time. There were so many more standards. First PCI then AGP then PCIe. CPU sockets that changed yearly or sometimes faster. Shader model and API revisions that meant your brand new graphics card couldn't play the latest game.

>>721117886
PC exclusive games were basically dead, just about everything was a 360 port that didnt use the potential of the hardware and still manage to run like a shit

>>721115932 (OP)
I think I was playing this on my $2000 machine, purchased in '04 (my first job paid for that machine). I had an ATI Radeon X800 Pro.

>>721116727
Duopoly as another anon said. Shame that S3 and a few rarer cards which can still sometimes be found by then are just gone now. Voodoos too. They were killed in the now perfected "embrace, extend, extinguish" cancer.

>>721116961
>porn hadn't yet rotted everyones brain
No one was obsessed over the sexual or desperate for it. I guess it's understandable that in today's fucked up climate kids grow up into maladjusted teens and further but still the glowscreen is definitely doing a number on their brains.

>>721116961
I went to a few LAN parties, and somebody was sharing pirated movies and TV so I got as much as I could on my external hard drive. Also got Half-Life for free that way, although I played it without music. No Internet access at my house.

>>721118116
This, and that was if you got a port at all. Developers were massively afraid of piracy and torrenting was in its heyday, so a lot of the times you just didn't get the game at all. Everything was console first and PC was worse than a second class citizen, you were actively treated as a criminal. Felt like all you ever got were late and often busted ports with draconian DRM.

>>721117173
>Like how widescreen monitors were coming into fashion
This was a mistake. Just like the LCD push. Manufacturers saved on production costs, great, but overall quality of monitors went down and down again and is only somewhat recovering now.

>>721116961
I think with porn, we appreciated what we could get and worked hard for it.

>>721117532
>Games like Deus Ex and Thief and TES were dumbed down for console audiences.
IW, not the original Deus Ex. Morrowind suffered from that almost as badly.

>>721118541
Not only that. It just wasn't that important. There were, and still are, other fun and/or important things in the world aside from sex and things related to it.

>>721118549
I mean the franchise not individual games. So you got DX IW, Thief DS, and so on. Also one that most people don't mention a lot is KotoR. Which is still a good game but it was explicitly Bioware dumbing down for a console.

When and why did Sony and Microsoft start porting their exclusives to Windows?

>>721118823
Do you have amnesia? That's extremely recent.

>>721118719
True. KotOR definitely would've been better if it wasn't crippled by needing to work on early PC-like consoles.

>>721115932 (OP)
terrible

>>721119172
Xbox had a high end PC-level GPU coupled with a low-tier Pentium III 733 CPU with a crippled cache. The system has Direct X 8.1, shader model 1.1, vertex shader 1.1 and two Vertex Shader units, while the Geforce 3's only had one. The Xbox GPU was quite powerful.

You can't name anything else on the PC that used bump mapping and similar lighting effects (such as the flashlight) before Halo in 2001. I doubt you'll find one.

>>721116998
is anybody on this board but me under the age of 35

>>721115932 (OP)
>Vista Ready

i remember getting a brad new laptop for around $200 because it shipped with too little ram for Vista to run decently, i just bought new ram sticks and it worked well enough to play World of Warcraft on it just barely.

>>721119390
It had too little RAM being the point. Curious how that's one of the few normally core things to mention that is absent in your post.

>>721116998
Crazy how PC gamers rallied behind this failed halo killer despite how hard it failed every time.

>>721115932 (OP)
I don't remember much. I remember downloading ZSNES and a rom package with 100+ games that took me a week to download on dial up.
Ended up with a computer virus and had to reformat and install a fresh OS.

>>721115932 (OP)
tech was moving really fast back then your new video card would be massively outdated or obsolete in less than two years. i miss physical pc games

>>721115932 (OP)
If you enjoyed military games, 2001-2007 was the best run of videogames ever, Red Storm were at their peak and czech developers were producing a legendary tactical FPS almost every single year.

>>721115932 (OP)
trying to get doom 3 to run, i think that's when my dad decided to update the computer

>>721115932 (OP)
Battlefield 2 was the biggest innovation

64 players, vehicles and air assets, commander directing the flow of battle, distinct classes, big maps. I really thought that some sort of MMOFPS with huge player counts would get made. But that never happened and never will.

>>721116727
>ATI? ATI MY ASS.

>>721115932 (OP)
On the hardware side, there was a lot less to worry about. You could kind of just get whatever and it'd be fine and you'd (mostly) get what you paid for, the market wasn't a minefield of nonsense like it is today.
On the games side... I still play a lot of games from 2005 so I'll just say "there was more sovl" and leave it at that.

>>721119465
How bad was Vista in 2006?

>>721119390
The main problem was that you still had to load everything from disk and there wasn't enough memory. You had a hard disk but it was tiny and I feel like there must've been something from Microsoft preventing you from installing big parts of the game to it. So you had amazing graphics but every level had to be a tiny box and you had a billion loading screens. This was people's main complaint against Invisible War and Deadly Shadows for example.

Also the answer is Jurassic Park Trespasser (1998) because it used ALL the tech. Broken shitty game for sure but it was insanely technically ambitious.

>>721119947
>there was a lot less to worry about
Well, things were a lot less plug 'n' play than now. I remember that everytime I had to open my case up I'd have to discharge by touching bare metal somewhere or else I was risking losing my whole build.
PATA cables broke so freaking easily, caps would blow up if you looked at them funny, chips would die if you were wearing a shirt, HDDs died for no reason at all, and man don't get me started on jumpers and all the master x slave faggotry that you had to configure.

>>721119853
It was called PlanetSide and it came out in 2003.

>>721120079
>The main problem was that you still had to load everything from disk and there wasn't enough memory

Halo used HDD caching

Blinx used it as a large cache for the rewinding stuff. That's legit the main thing I think of when I think of the HDD

People don't think about it since the non-arcade 360 models included at least a 20GB HDD, but it meant game developers could never code their games around HDD caching since it was no longer a guarantee. Eventually MS said screw it and allowed mandatory installs and what not, but it was a minor pain point for a while.

>>721116508
In 2005 I was playing BF2 and WoW

>>721115932 (OP)
Play WoW or Counterstrike all day

>>721120079
Don't forget controls. Adapting games that normally require dozens of key bindings to gamepads affected them negatively.

>>721120220
How much of a game changer was SATA 1?

>>721116961
>No porn
>No hardware-level spyware/bloatware
>No gacha
>No Chinks or Jeets
>Lan parties
It's easy to forget just how ludicrously good we used to have it. We got complacent.

>>721120389
Imo in the same level as USB C (luv me USB C).
Hotswapping was cool at the time

>>721117561
>5
any high-end PC from 15 years ago can still run everything that's not poorly optimized
graphical advancements have hit a hard cap with extremely high diminishing returns

>>721115932 (OP)
Exactly the same as now but when you bought an upgrade it was an upgrade

this thread really shows how young and american most of this board is lol. probably not the right place to ask when these kids were busy with nickelodean PS2 tie in games

>>721120220
>don't get me started on jumpers and all the master x slave faggotry that you had to configure.
Wasn't difficult for me or anyone I knew who assembled their own PCs. Anyone who didn't just memorise it all and easily remembered whenever needed were the kind to call launching Internet Explorer "running the Internet" to something to that effect.

>>721120323
ugh, fucking weapon wheels

>>721120578
Were you changing your HDDs layouts every month?

DFI motherboards were the color of radioactive mountain dew and overclocked to the XTREME.

>>721116727
>get the best version of a game (Doom 3, Half Life 2, Oblivion/Morrowind
because these games were developed for pc and then ported to consoles, now its the other way around

>>721120412
We didn't. Its just too many of them showed up and they are far, far less discriminating than we were.

What was Vista like in 2007

>>721120682
No, I just didn't have such shitty memory that I forgot it 15 minutes after reading about it for the first time in a manual.

>>721120724
and hardware boxes were covered in hot babes

>>721120602
Weapon wheels feel more modern to me. Turok 2 had them, but with Xbox shooters, I mostly remember everyone moving towards Halo's 2 weapon limit.

>>721119770
Doom 3 freaked me out even at 15 because I wasn't used to horror and horror atmosphere. My uncle installed it for me free.

>>721120843
I dunno I rode XP sp3 until 2013.

The year is 2004
I beg my mom to drive me to Circuit City so I can buy the brand new EVGA GeForce FX 5500 and put it inside my HP pavilion prebuilt with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 that I overclocked with a third party tool (3 dollars to request support for my OEM CPU btw)
While I’m there, I also buy Half Life 2 unaware that my life is about to change forever.

>>721120862
wow, 2 nanoseconds of ddr3 memory!

>>721118479
>LCD
The steady decline of the used CRT market has been disheartening to watch. I wish I would've gotten an FW900 while I still could (for a sane price) but I missed that bus. CRTs look so much better than literally anything else, zoomers got no idea how tragic a loss it really is. I wish some madlad company would spin up production for new CRTs with HDMI/DisplayPort input but it's obvious now that's probably not gonna happen.

>>721120775
Exactly. I still remember the forum arguments about this. I was sceptical but not entirely because I thought even publishers aren't that retarded to just burn all PC gamer goodwill. Turns out that was the more profitable choice because given enough time and brainwashing you can grow a new crop of less knowledgeable and thus less demanding PC gamers.

>>721115932 (OP)
better than sexo with sexy anime cats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2OONf8QIkQ

>>721115932 (OP)
>in 2005
Compositors, lots and lots of failing compositors.

>>721120862
Pretty much. Its important to know that we all though it was kind of funny but kitchy because like pic realted, they were almost always some sort of chinese knock off of some vidya babe. It wasn't Lara Croft, or Joanna Dark, or others from various games be it JP or Western, it was some sexy non specific rendering. If you didn't see the box it came on, most of the time you couldn't tell if it was a Asus, DFI, Sapphire, Diamond, BFG, or anything else. There were some occasional characters that were established, like ATI (back before, and in the earliest years of AMD ownership but under their own branding had ) had "Ruby" pic related - but she didn't always have the same hair or overall look, but the Bloodrayne-style looks were some of the more common ones (shortish hair, swords).

What was disk defragging like?

>>721120862
Lotta monsters and weird creatures too from what I recall

>>721121047
It's possible but they would cost 10 times they used to if not more. Manufacturers could afford much lower prices due to huge scale conveyors allowing extreme levels of optimisation. Now it would be one line they'd probably need to build from scratch if they even can get access to documentation and won't need to design everything too (and then run into at least some of the design problems others have solved decades ago). And since the majority is Pavlov-conditioned to use widescreens that'd be a problem as well.

>>721121096
i did my part and boycotted mw2, shame it didnt make a difference

>>721121253
Long. I should do the modern equivalent, actually.

>>721121253
Made you look like some computer guru but I can only think of 1 or 2 times it legit fixed a problem and wasn't just basic bitch maintainence or rule of cool stuff.

>>721121421
Yeah because that game was literally crack cocaine in for form

>>721121106
>failing compositors
As in, image editors???

>>721121253
I loved that, I actually watched it defrag for like an hour, it reminded me of reboot

Remember what dual-cores were like and when AMD came up with a 64 bit design that was somewhat x86 compatible?

I joined one of the biggest "old guard" hardware and overclocking communities in 2003, alongside building my first watercooled PC. I worked with a system integrator (back in the days of boutique stuff and could put really cool graphics wraps on cases, do custom laser cut fan grills and other stuff that was hard for a stand alone enthusiast to do) who basically did the cosmetic part and the watercooling system itself (with badass green UV reactive coolant!), but I put it and all the parts together, along with inverter powered UV Cold Cathodes. People from all over my college dorm came to see my case giving off purple light and glowing like I had the fucking T Virus in its reservoir . All that cooling power went toward a Pentium 4 hyperthreading (whcih was a new feature at the time) and Northwood / Prescott were insanely hot.

>>721121528
I used to think this guy wore a tank top

>>721121335
that too

>>721115932 (OP)
flash games

>>721121421
I don't think I've ever played any CoD beyond the first one. I got really tired of the WW2 themed shooters leading up to that and then played way too many CS back when it was a mod, and before v1.6 too. Never grew to like the tacticool variety of shooters in general. The early BFs were the only exception I guess.

>>721121646
>dual-cores
I do remember the jokes about how Pentium Ds were just two weak pentiums glued together.
Think we'd only get real dual cores with the core2duo.

>>721115932 (OP)
People bitch about the performance of video games nowadays but your hardware used to be obsolete before you even got back from the store. Like "won't even start the game at all" level, none of this moaning about fps. I used to run games through some third party software just to emulate missing GPU features. FUCK pixel shader.

>>721121335
Monsters often came a bit earlier or other 'badass' things but when graphical fidelity came along sufficient to make "sexy" work, many switched that way

>>721121646
I had a Socket 939 Opteron (ie a workstation chip, not an Athlon64 consumer chip) overclocked for quite some time.

>>721115932 (OP)
every game was modded, and the mods were better than most modern games

>>721121762
Yeah, retarded zoomers have it good now. There was a new direct x version making your hardware ewaste every few years.

>>721121835
How kino was Athlon?

>>721121841
and you didn't need to subscribe to some trannies patreon and discord server too download them

>>721121145
Around this time I developed an enjoyment of this short hairstyle because of Beth from the "Passions" soap opera. I was homeschooled.

>>721121863
This was basically in every prebuilt pc known to man at the time. Then Intel liquid diarrhead all over AMD with c2d and c2q

>>721121762
Anytime someone complains about their 8 year old card not being able to run new AAA games at 60 fps I instantly know that they're a newfag to pc gaming. They're lucky that the game even boots.

>>721121848
>Yeah, retarded zoomers have it good now. There was a new direct x version making your hardware ewaste every few years.

Zoomers don't know how good they have it

>Windows 7 x64 and DX11
>Windows 10 x64 and DX12
>SATA 3
>NVMe
>8GB+ VRAM
>Most games are built for PS5 and Windows at the same time

>>721115932 (OP)
Damn near everything could play on a potato.

>>721122015
But nooo I can’t get 4k 60 fps in a new game on my 6 year old hardware reeee games are shit it’s all ue5s fault!

>>721122061
no it couldn't you larping zoomer

>>721115932 (OP)
>2005
>get help from dad building an athlon 64 PC with a geforce 6800 ultra
>core 2 duo and pci-e the following year

>>721115932 (OP)
>2005
>The D/C on that QFP package is 0726,(YYWW) on the 2nd line with COO
>26th work week of 2007

Remember these resolutions?

800x600
848x480
1024x768
1280x720
1280x768
1280x1024
1360x768
1440x900
1680x1050

>>721121337
If it performs as well as it should, I can think of worse deals.
>Widescreen
This one at least is easy to solve, you can in fact just make a widescreen CRT - Sony, Philips and I believe some others made them very briefly (the aforementioned FW900 is one such model from Sony).

It took 5 generations of video cards before crysis was actually playable

>>721122234
i need to go back

>>721122248
the 8800GT came out a year later

>>721122234
for me, it was 1600x1200

>>721121863
Athlon64 came earlier (same with the Opteron I had) but a little later came the Phenom and Phenom II Black Edition. These were fucking fantastic, and in many cases you could actually UNLOCK A WHOLE FUCKING CORE. If you were willing to pay for it you could get a Phenom II BE which had 4 cores and was unlocked, but there were Phenom II 3 and 2 core models and if you had a suitable mobo, you could actually unlock and overclock actual cores, turning a 3 or 2 core, into a 4 core model! No guarantees of course , sometimes they were disabled because the cores were actually shitty and not really capable, but you ad the channce if you were willing to take it. Its not like today where you'll never buy a 8 core CPU and unlock it to a 16 core one; they're physically burned out. Note that you could also do this with some GPUs, where you could turn one model into another sometimes with a firmware change. I remembered you could turn ATI 4850s into 4870/4890 etc.

>>721122234
1900x1200 was the 4k of today
Maybe even 5k because 1680x1050 was also rare

>>721122116

it could, you just were playing a slideshow instead of a game.

>>721121841
and when you say mods, you mean total conversion mods
not the shitty porn skins you see on /v/ these days

>>721122234
A couple

>>721122342
Why did Phenom and FX get so much hate?

>>721122316
Not even the 8800ultra could maintain 60 fps

>>721122450
Garbage temps, but they weren't hated though?

https://hardforum.com/threads/8800-ultra-at-1920x1200-crysis-demo-barely-playable-in-vista.1237517/

Good time capsule. This is what gaming was like back then you spoiled brats.

>Yes 60fps affects some people but anything above 25fps is considered playable. My set up can handle Crysis at 1920 x 1200 with shader processing on very high, postprocessing on medium, and most other settings a mix of high/very high (Textures very high is one i remmeber off the top of my head) and I never drop below 25fps except when zoomed in very far im using a ton of water effects it seems.

>>721121528
god that show fell off so hard
I miss the techy worldbuilding shit. I dont think most shows would go that deeply into it these days

>>721121646
I remember the massive boost in performance going from a 2004-ish Pentium 4 3.4GHz to Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz even though the clock rate was lower. It was a great time to build a new computer and run pirated Crysis on good settings.

>>721122450
Mainly because of Bulldozer (aka FX) which came right about the time that Core 2 architecture showed up and absolutely wiped the floor with it, while Bulldozer / Pilledriver were massively hot and hardly capable by comparison. Ironically, it was sort of the invert of what happened with Intel since the Ryzen era from AMD - basically Intel has always been a rests-on-laurels companies because "Intel will always engineer the very best when it needs it". For a long time they did because they kept up fabs and development, but then much like the LONG fuck you of
>4 cores there shall be, from the end of the Core 2 era through the i7 6000+ series for years upon years
because they thought themselves unbeatable. Also they did do some cool shit on the HEDT side - I am a big HEDT supporter and had a i7 X58 platform and then X99 for awhile and the latter had a rare example in the 5960X of a 8c/16t CPU LONG before Ryzen would show up, but it was not the mainstream platform at all.).

I remember running Warcraft 3 on a 128MB RAM rig and then getting angry at my opponent because my computer would freeze for a good 5-10 seconds every single time I would send my enemy army into theirs.

>>721122450
Retarded Intel bandwagoners. "It's not Intel so it must suck lol". The brainrot started a lot longer ago than most people think.
Just about everything AMD made leading up to Bulldozer was great. Even Bulldozer wasn't actually that bad, just marketed horrendously (they had half as many physical cores as AMD said they did - an "eight core" Bulldozer CPU was, due to the architecture, a 4-core chip with 8 physical threads, the latter of which is what AMD chose to advertise as "cores").

Halo 2 Vista gave us XInput Game Controller APIs specifically for the Xbox 360 controller in 2007

>>721122846
lol

>>721122234
I still run most games in most of those. Ratio preservation in video card driver settings is the only thing that keeps me from flying into a murderous rage these days.

>>721122234
>1680x1050
i miss that resolution

Games for Windows Live...

Soul

>>721120843
Lots of blue screens. It had a terrible reputation.

>>721122061
No you couldn't. If you had a seven year old PC then that meant your DOS-based Windows was only good for what was now considered dated retro games. if you had a four year old PC you might find something you had requirements for in the bargain bin. We went from few hundred MHz CPUs to three thousand MHz CPUs in no time in the early noughties.

>>721122243
>This one at least is easy to solve
Was easy to solve. That the most successful manufacturers eventually figured it out doesn't mean that it's easy to do - or that it's cheap for that matter. Not the resulting things, the whole process from design to new production lines to QA not sending too much of the results into the trash.

>>721123095
Because third party drivers sucked

>>721123062
>Soul
lol

You now remember the Dark Souls 360 to Windows DX9 port

>>721122617
>that youtube video of the crysis explosive barrel megatower, where it was originally recorded in seconds per frame
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG5qDeWHNmk

>>721123160
>>721123062
You can just tell who actually was alive then and who is larping. GWFL was genuinely irredeemable dog shit

>>721122061
absolutely not. shit was moving fast. not quite as fast as in the latter half of nineties but still pretty fast. thankfully the physics cards never became a popular thing. wouldn't want to buy fucking physics cards in addition to gpus

>>721123239
Xbox has been trying to kill Steam for years

>Halo 2 Vista
>Games for Windows Live
>DirectX10
>Xbox Live Gold
>Xbox ecosystem (Xbox app)
>Xbox Game Pass
>Valve want Linux gaming, MS wants Windows gaming

>>721121253
Made the difference between Oblivion being an utter slideshow and perfectly playable.
I don't miss magnetic disks one bit lmao

>>721123062
no

>>721123430
They’re giving up now though. The full screen experience thing + Xbox app now showing games from all storefronts is msft admitting defeat

>>721115932 (OP)
>AGP thread

>>721115932 (OP)
it was around the time I started REALLY getting into PC games beyond shitty free MMO's like maplestory, runescape, and flyff.
the game that popped my PC cherry was age of mythology in 2002 (I bought it twice), but what really got me was doom. I was so excited to play doom 3 that I built my first computer at 14 yo just to play it. it came with some pre-installed stuff but I had to put a few parts in myself. I was so sleep deprived I literally couldn't get through the installer, ended up passing out and installing it first try the next day. I thoroughly enjoyed the game.

>>721123602
Yes agp was the primary interface for video cards

>>721115932 (OP)
its the era of f2p gooks mmo

Halo PC was brutal

>Bungie releases the Xbox version of Halo CE in 2001
>Gearbox releases the PC port of Halo: CE in 2003
>despite it coming out two years later, the PC port is using an older build of the game, with incomplete shaders, bump mapping, particle effects, etc.
>Animations are capped at 30 FPS with no interpolation, making everything jittery (fixed with custom edition mods)
>Broken shaders, bump maps etc anons have mentioned, makes Jackels impossible to determine by rank since their shield colors rely off shaders
>Some textures are lower res than Xbox
>Some models using earlier revisions
>FOV is tied to aspect ratio so your FOV is worse on 16:9 than 4:3
>The FOV is also locked with no option to change it without external tools

>>721122617
In Crysis it's not like the game needed hundreds of FPS like in a competitive shooter for you to feel like the frame rate didn't impede your playing enough to bother you. I also remember hitting like 40 to 60 FPS with a 8800 GTS albeit in 1280x1024 as was the style at the time and it wasn't for the gameplay feeling that I tweaked the settings further for rather than just the show.

>>721123847
i played crysis at around 15-18 fps and enjoyed it
somehow

>>721117886
360 era killed the entire vidya industry for years and it still hasn't fully recovered. the most popular genre is STILL godawful normie fps sloppa.

>>721123602
That's not AGP, that's PCI-E. There's a smaller one (x1? x2? Never memorised them well enough) close by.

First time i ever cracked something was my copy of NFS most wanted for PC because the code on the disk only worked once and i was using a new hard drive

>>721122234
>1280x1024
damn that reso is surreally perfect resolution

>>721123994
>360 era killed the entire vidya industry for years and it still hasn't fully recovered. the most popular genre is STILL godawful normie fps sloppa.

CoD began on PC bro

360 just made it more accessible

>>721122884
On one hand, DirectInput was already a perfectly functioning interface but on the other hand even the Xbox controller mapping names are easier to remember than "press [Button 1] to shoot"

Why did Steam get so much hate?

>>721124037
Cracks are a perfectly acceptable convenience measure for legit owners too. Same as making images to avoid wearing the discs down.

>>721116153
Building your own PC back then was awesome
Having a window was cool and you would fill it full of cathode tubes from frozencpu

>>721123562
>SATA SSD
The Crucial MX500 and the Samsung 800 series (depending on the version) are some of the very best SATA SSD (and they have V-RAM assembly). Even the latest Samsung 870 EVO (the best of the kind for SATA in its class) still has 560MB/s as the SSDs basically saturated the SATA3 / 6gbps connection!

Though honestly even today its more than enough for most gaming usage; PCI-E drives only make a big difference for non-gaming workloads. In the early days, a SSD may have been 32GB and cost a fucking fortune. Also before SSDs came the big swinging dick choice for performance was
>10K RPM HDDS!
>WD Raptor 74GB
>WD VelociRaptor 300-600gb!

I had a Raptor in my 2003 system noted above and it was as big an upgrade over typical PATA or even SATA drives as a SSD would be over a platter HDD these days. That's even before we talk about SCSI and SAS!

>>721123189
Maybe I have particularly fond memories of the online play on PC just because I live in an area where there's always been enough gamers, but specifically for Dark Souls on PC, I greatly miss the period of being able to send unpromted messages to other players simply because you encountered them in the game and the messaging system kept track of who you've just encountered.

>>721124053
halo, dumbass. it reinvented (read: dumbed down) the arena formula for xbox kids and dudebros and that enshittification bled out into other games including your precious cawadoody.

>>721124132
Because they forced everyone to migrate to a buggy shit program if they wanted to keep plying counter strike

Here's your Seagate HDD bro

>>721119510
Tribes is older than Halo, and it was always in a very different niche.

>>721124448
Everyone has at leastvone of these
And they still work

>>721124448
>1TB
>2005

You now remember SSHD

A typical SSDH offers an average read/write speed of 131/139 MBps

>>721115932 (OP)
Lots of extremely good RTS.

>>721124448
Too thin.

>>721115932 (OP)
Fun

>>721123359
>thankfully the physics cards never became a popular thing. wouldn't want to buy fucking physics cards in addition to gpus
The only reason GPUs as device "separate" from the main system ever took off with consumers was because they were really badly needed. Anyone who has added a 3D accelerator card to a computer that originally didn't have one knows the difference it makes, and it wasn't like software renderers didn't just try hard enough, it was just sort of a dead end.

>>721124448
1TB was an insane amount of space for that time.
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/average-hard-drive-in-2005.2210228/

The proprietary Xbox 360 HDD that actually uses standard 2.5" SATA hard disk drives (HDDs) held within custom enclosures

>>721115932 (OP)
dota

>>721124045
>tfw squeezing a 16:9 game image onto a 5:4 display so you can see wider despite the distortion

>>721124206
Honestly I wish platter drives weren't displaced entirely by SSDs, I remember Seagate demoed an HDD that had SSD-like speed just before total SSD domination took hold, I don't think anything came of it because they were selling it exclusively to enterprise customers and there was no interest. If I recall correctly it used a weird on-disk RAID system where it actually presented itself as two separate drives. I feel like you could really go places with that. Too bad normies only care about big number and neither SATA nor SAS can hit as big a number as PCI-E NVMe.
I don't really like SSDs, I like the speed and I like that they don't need defragging but whenever they fail, you get zero warning and oops all your data is gone with no hope of recovery. At least if a platter drive died without you noticing all the data was still on the disk so you could always get it back.

>2009
>Valve Confirms Left 4 Dead DLC Free On PC, Paid On Xbox 360

>>721124516
They do still work. A bit noisy but still.

>>721124448
that model is less than a decade old. they started using capital C for BarraCuda in 2016

>>721124613
>anything with GBs
>thick
Try finding a 10 MB HDD.

Why is SLi no longer a thing?

>>721125024
Too jewish of an idea even for masters at kikery like nvidia and AMD (crossfire).

>>721122234
>1280x768
it's absurdly hard to get a CRT that can go beyond 1280x768 these days, 98% of still surviving screens are office surplus rotting in closets for 20 years.

I used to fuck my disc drives. I would click open the drive, put my dick in where the disc would go, and then close the drive on my dick. some drives were much more pleasant than others.

>>721123797
i hate gearbox

>>721125024
Designing the MB for providing the full bandwidth to both cards while also providing some bandwidth for everything else turned out to be too difficult.

>>721116998
>>721124510
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83EUuibmDp8
Yeah, and nothing else ever came close

It was fucking amazing, back then the internet was 99% straight white males and there was a level of harmony you can only dream of. We didn't know how good we had it...

You wanna talk about soul
THIS is soul

>>721125024
It never worked.

>>721124857
mass storage HDD still exist frend.

>>721115932 (OP)
peak WoW, so personally speaking pretty good.

>>721125024
it became increasingly inefficient and started bottlenecking itself really fast

>>721125216
Why is 8TB the largest size for SATA SSD and NVMe SSD?

>>721121253
buy an HDD and try it you fag

>>721125323
because people don't really need more and selling larger sizes at consumer prices would eat into the enterprise market.

Kino resolutions are making a come back

In 2005 I was a ps2 gamer that frequented the PlayStation forums. Someone had made a thread about a day of defeat free weekend so I downloaded steam and tried it out. The rest is history….

>>721124857
I had one of those drives actually , or one similar. It was the main drive in my laptop at the time - it had a regular platter HDD along with basically a tiny SSD to be used as cache (there was actually some fuckery about having to cull NCQ and TRIM in order to use it on Linux back in the day as I recall) built in and would shuffle data in and out for certain kinds of reads and writes it could be much faster if the data was in the right place. It had some issues but it wasn't a bad idea - the problem was that it would be totally outclassed when regular SSDs became large and/or cheap enough. Even just SATA SSDs at 32, 64, 100+GB were just that much faster over even a Hybrid Seagate drive like that, and worked for all kinds of reads and writes, that people mostly moved on. SAS for as much as I loved it, like SCSi before, was pretty much for uber-enthusiasts and primarily businesses as you needed special hardware (though SAS was great because you could use SATA consumer drives on the same controller).

>SSD failure
For what its worth modern SSDs should give you tons of SMART notice not to mention that the modern TLC SSD storage (I am a bit annoyed at how top of the line SSDs went from 2 bit to 3 bit but they've improved at least. However the much cheaper 4-bit is less desirable) should have much more durability overall. In the old days SSDs did't have TRIM and NCQ and other shit (I was gifted a VERY expensive Sony STILL MADE IN JAPAN ultrabook that had a super special SSD that basically had a custom interface that didn't support all that stuff so it was a very expensive executoy if you didn't back it up). but once they did it got much better.

Today there's still a role for platter HDDs but its mostly high capacity. I still build NASes out of "shucc'd" WD/HGST white lable drives that give me WDGold/HGST He10 for a fraction of the price, 8TB or greater each time.

>>721125473
>because people don't really need more
>640 KB

>>721125574
I still use 1TB drives, my boot drive is 500gb. the only reason you'd need 8GB is if you're a hoarder who never deletes anything.

I got an ATI Radeon graphics card so I could play Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. I played a ton of SimCity 4 as well. It was a good time for building games.

>>721125192
No, that is HP office junk. You want SOVL?

>LianLi ARMORSUIT P-80
>Early 2000s
>ALL FUCKING ALUMINUM TOP TO BOTTOM
>Massive fans and watercooling capacity
The red version here was the ATI collab, but I had the black version with 3x blue 120mm LED fans under the front grill !

>>721125569
So HGST is still good?

>>721125652
Damn, I feel so silly now for wanting to keep things that never disappear from the Internet!

>>721125761
>ALUMINUM

What are the best modern aluminum cases?

>>721125784
HGST is still good, but they're a sub-brand of WD now mostly for business use.

Why did 120mm become the standard? Why not 140mm, 160mm or 200mm?

>>721125784
hoarding is a legitimate problem, you need to learn to let go sometimes.

Warcraft 3 custom games

>>721124132
I really miss older steam. I have a few games and seeing them totally takes me back to that time. Zeno Clash, World of Goo, The Ship, Rag Doll Kung Fu, Hammerfight. I'm forgetting lots but there were these games and they were always just kinda there.

The number of games getting pumped into steam now is crazy. Just constantly being churned out.

>most computers came with a 5400RPM drive, lots of 4200RPM out there
>512MB with shared graphics was the norm
>usually on a P4

It was pretty kino

>>721115932 (OP)
PC gamers were second class citizens when it came to multiplats.

I am bout to cause a nostalgia trip on your mind.

WildTangent
Cartoon Network Teen Titans game

>>721115932 (OP)
Good time for RTS, mostly a grim time for other genres except shooters a bit

>>721125917
There are good old video games and good old TV shows that are either very difficult to find in open access or outright impossible. Not to mention patches ruining video games sometimes. Not to mention mods disappearing because "teehee my computer got all broken and my CorpoCloud(tm) doesn't have everything" or because the author just dies or whatever. But sure, go on, you're clearly an expert on the subject.

>>721125268
How did we go from that to this? When was the moment when AIO became mandatory?

>>721125090
I had an old Dell CRT that would do 1600x1200 @ 75hz. Elite: Dangerous looked amazing on it. Then the tube went bad, and now my graphics card doesn't even have VGA or DVI out. I miss it, /v/ros...

>CS 1.6
>Warcraft 3
>Starcraft
>Diablo 2
>GTA Sandreas
>Socom 2
>Battlefield 2

>>721125841
These days there are almost no true aluminum cases. Its so much more expensive now. Even many that have a front fascia or panels that look like aluminum have a steel structure. Back in these days though the whole fucking thing was aluminum. I have a rare old Silverstone SG01-Evolution that was the the last "toaster PC" that was full aluminum before they cut it for steel. Silverstone and LianLi were some of the big brands back in the day but these days now they're not FULL aluminum. THough some are kinda close.

This reminds me there are some that don't exist anymore, like the legendary Japanese PC case maker
>SOLDAM
>WiNDY
that never officially sold outside of Japan - you paid an assload for an importer. Though some of the very, very best cases are made by
>CaseLabs
They used to be made in the US. Not jsut designed MADE. Their cases were basically never out of commission - you could buy individual components and upgrades for it
>Yes I'd like to change the 2x 120mm fans on the front to a acrylic window for my new radiator. Please send me just the front panel for this model, with the window, thanks
The company sadly folded the case business; their gov't contracting company is still existing though. On the good side, they sold the name and plans to a kick ass Swede who seems to be getting all the old stuff back for production again. https://caselabs.se/

Note everything they make in CL is a big expensive fuck you case. These predate the little glass fishtanks; they have unlimited room for drives, radiators and other enthusiast stuff so if you don't need that, it may be way way too expensive to bother

>>721126128
aios are not mandatory

>>721126128
people were doing gaudy LED and cathode lighting back then too, they just didn't have addressable colors

>>721116727
>Video card market wasn't a monopoly (Nvidia vs ATI)
It is still this, AMD acquired ATI.

>>721126534
Yeah. We would have KILLED for RGB back in the day. You had to choose and stick with one thing for each device. That is where the
>RED MAKES IT GO FAST
>BLUE MAKES IT COOL
>GREEN MAKES IT USE LESS POWER
>WHITE MAKES IT CLASSY
>UV MAKES IT XTREME
etc..memes came from.

>>721122229
Same except with pentium 4.

>>721124132
Because at the time it didn't really work all that well. Strange long pauses of loading in the UI and unexpected offline times. It got better but it wasn't very smooth in 2007 when I started using it.
>>721125990
I don't like the modern Steam client either but I think it was fine most of the 2010s - not 00s though.

>>721115932 (OP)
Slow and difficult. Lots of manual configuration to optimize graphics, lots of driver and OS problems, lots of compatibility issues. Regardless, I still miss those years. I started PC gaming in 1995 and never looked back.

>>721115932 (OP)
Mainly valve and blizzard games with the odd rts or some eurojank that if released today would probably been viral. Communities were better for the most part imo. Then the west wanted to emulate the south korean starcraft scene with every fucking game and it went downhill.

It was also the foundations of being connected to people better than your local friend group. What turned from sharing CD-ROMs with your friends then talking about games at lunch at school ended up becoming talking on vent, teamspeak, xfire to vastly different people than in your grades. I remember managing people in a guild whilst being 15 and it was more professional than anything in my 30s because I was allowed to do everything myself not be dragged down by old retards.

How did we go from this...

>>721127269
to this?

I remember never winter nights 2 and oblivion

>>721115932 (OP)
Asus was innovative, ATI was at one of its peaks, HL2, DOOM 3, F.E.A.R. and console peasants were in the place that they belonged

>>721124857
>if a platter drive died without you noticing all the data was still on the disk so you could always get it back
My friend once described him frantically copying over his crucial data when his system started failing due to the hard disk breaking down as the "ending scene from Star Wars with Luke escaping the exploding Death Star with everything breaking down around him".
I kinda agree there's some kind of charm when it's like that, but I've just personally had a lot of magnetic disks break down on me and never an SSD that wasn't showing some symtoms from the very start and I fucking mistreat my hard disks up the ass. I'm just happy to not have to deal with as much data loss. I understand power surges can cause sudden disk deaths but I kinda trust the local electricians and the not-cheapest parts I bought more than the flimsy fucking needles constantly running across a mirror sheen spinning magnet disks. No mechanically moving parts just makes too much sense to not do.

>>721127269
Still have at least one of those lying in boxes somewhere. They were bad. Loud and not very good at the job.

>>721127324
These are much better. One of the rare cases of things straight up improving in computers.

>>721125913
200mm was kind of shit. only fits on the wide sides of the case and since it extendes multiple cm inside the case, it easily gets in the way other stuff, like cpu coolers. couldn't close my damn case

>Playing Hollow Knight
>Steam Overlay says CPU usage is 10%
>13th gen i5
>100 degress c
Is it over for me bros?

>>721127835
Bro just get a 9800X3D

i built my first computer around that time and people thought i was a super genius destined to work at NASA or something

>>721126063
This varied, you either got a game clearly designed for a PC like yours then jammed somehow onto consoles like Call of Duty, or you got a PC port of a console game that was popular enough that was identical to the console version down to controls obviously meant for gamepads now crazily bound onto your keyboard.
In hindsight, GTA 3 on PC adapting the controls to as if you were always locked on with your aim to make the mouse aim natural was a brave, probably correct choice at the time.

>>721115932 (OP)
1024x768

>>721115932 (OP)
I pirated everything.

>>721125913
>Why did 120mm become the standard?
Because it won the war against 80mm.

>>721127462
i need to replay those games this October

>>721115932 (OP)
had LAN games with my mom, stepdad, and stepbrother because there was a computer in every room and my stepdad liked half life and counter strike.

eventually i got into runescape. then my mom started playing everquest and my stepdad bought her a lot of platinum.

>>721127835
do you have a stock cooler? replace that shit immediately

>>721127954
>just spend $500 for the CPU, $200 for a mobo + $100 for DDR 5 bro

>>721128791
It's got 3 fans but yeah the cooler is stock chinese stuff.

>>721122234
>1680x1050
This was 8K for the boomers.

>>721129104
buy a thermalright assassin refined 120 for your CPU for 20 dollars, it'll bring your cpu temps down dramatically

>xbox is a "console"
>literally just a pc

>>721129301
>Still can't emulate it
dohohohoho

>>721115932 (OP)
you had to beg on forums for fixes or be smart enough to fix it yourself because the devs didnt really give a shit

>>721129273
>for 20 dollars
Maybe in your capitalist hellhole, the cheapest I can find is 50

>>721129403
>because the devs didnt really give a shit
Oh really? Is that why they had phone numbers printed in the manuals, released patches and expansions that included those patches?

>>721129374
Xbox Series have their own emulator

Microsoft told Digital Foundry that in backwards compatibility, the CPU turns off SMT, so only 8 physical cores are available to games (to simulate last gen CPUs) and also the GPU doesn't run in its next-gen native RDNA 2 mode, but it pretends to be a last-gen GCN GPU.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/backward-compatibility

I just miss the SOVL

>>721129461
i'm sure you can find an equivalent tower cooler for cheaper in your godless communistic nightmare

>>721127324
I've got one of these (Noctua NH-D15, for any newfags following along). Kicks ass, no pump noise and no worries about leaks or pump failure. If the fan dies you can replace it. This, the Scythe Fuma 3, and the BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 5 and Dark Rock Elite are the best CPU coolers you can get. Love these big niggas like you wouldn't believe.

>>721120412
>no porn

haha

>>721115932 (OP)
A meme. Just a bunch a WoW and Runescape faggots. PC gaming really took off around 2010 when the consoles were old, powerful GPUs were around $300, and games started getting ported to PC.

>>721115932 (OP)
It sucked. You walked into a Wal-Mart and for PC games you had your choice of whatever crappy budget "tycoon" game they had, Sims expansion packs, children's software, tax software, maybe some terribly-coded port of a console game, online games, and very few original games that sold poorly (like The Movies). Most of them had DRM anyway.

There was a reason why PC gamers sucked off Gabe Newell for years.

>>721131360
i got my pc games from toys r us, like Jurassic Park Operation Genesis

>>721122450
The FX 8350 and the FX9590 were both able to keep me in the high end gaming space in the 2010s just fine. The FX 8350 was insanely good bang for buck at the time. The 9590 needed some serious cooling though and AIO coolers did just fine with the CPU, but if you didn't have good cooling it was rough. Ryzen changed everything though.

>>721115932 (OP)
constant BSOD and broken PC parts because PSU back in the day pretty shit

>>721122342
God I miss my Phenom II BE. Those were the days.

>>721125024
>new game comes out or patch comes out for MMO I'm playing
>head to forums
>nothing but SLi users bitching about it being broken and having to wait weeks to be able to play
it literally never worked

i miss PC swap meets bros...

>>721124717
>you can now add SSDs to any xbox360 now

it only took 20 years
https://youtu.be/fFnmAtn9qY4

>>721126534
There was a trend where people made mineral oil PCs. I miss the insanity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eub39NaC4rc

>>721131625
I bought several PC games at Menards once

>>721125574
Other anon is right to some existent. Storage companies know very few people even even buy the higher complicity drives that aren't major companies with large servers, same for HDD but that's mostly because we're reaching the physical cap on those. Not to mention you got a younger generation of retards growing up too afraid to even use a computer, stream all their shit, use their phone as a desktop, and think things on the internet will last forever. Normalfags who do tend to buy storage only use about 500GB to 1TB and that's mostly because their favorite shitty files or software became extremely bloated. Simple music files and image files are still crazy small if you don't count .flac and take 8k images.

Individual people who download and hoard everything are in the minority and companies aren't going to waste that much effort on tin foils. They WILL however find a way to bleed you dry and make you pay an extra 1,000+$ for 1 extra terabtyle

>8TB = 500$
>9TB = 5,000$
And you will be happy.

>>721129461
Bro I found a Hyper 212 knockoff for the equivalent of $18 over here, came in a sketchy box with zero documentation and the mounting bracket felt like it was machined by a blind guy in a garage, but it works. You just gotta embrace the slavic gamble approach to PC building.

>>721115932 (OP)
my computer back then sucked i really just used the internet and practiced making pages with html and i played games on console

I remember when this shit was the latest thing on the market

>>721115932 (OP)
>oh man doom 3 looks sick
>what? I need what gpu now? Jesus fucking christ whatever this better last 2 years this time or else i quit.
>oh man this unreal tournament game looks sick

>>721134032
I remember when Fleet Farm had PC games.

>>721115932 (OP)
Used to make jokes like "once you carried your hardware out of the store, it's already obsolete". Nowadays, you have people whining that their 8-year-old GPU might not be able to play a very demanding new game.

>>721126578
>uhm actually
No, idiot. AMD is not competition to Nvidia's GPUs. AMD is for retards who think they are supporting the underdog, and there aren't enough of them to count.

>>721120843
Pretty much everybody who had any sense skipped it and smoothly went from XP to 7.

>>721116508
this guy is a clueless zoomer

>>721115932 (OP)
GPUs had SOVL.

>>721137253
You have no idea how frustrating it was to build an absolute monster of a machine only for the FEAR demo to come out three months later and make it struggle, then Oblivion the next year

>>721121863
I had an athlon x2 5200, it got mogged by single core Pentium 4 in gaming performance

>>721122342
I had a Phenom and it sucked ass, that was my last straw with AMD. Core i7 was revolutionary.

>>721138549
Phenom isn't anything special. Phenom II is good.

>>721137342
>more GPU performance per dollar
>not competitive
Indian spotted

>>721120843
Fine as long as you didn't run it on what they claimed minimum requirements were, I ran Vista on a variant of OP's motherboard into the mid 10s without issue

>>721138008
Kek. A good example.

>>721138549
As the other anon mentions, Phenom was okay but Phenom II was much better and competed favorably against most Core 2. Later, Core i7 was as big a step up over Core / Core 2, as they were over Pentium 4 / P4D, and was a different class and era. Unfortunately, AMD's Bulldozer was a really bad design and the Core i3 / i5, and especially i7 (which meant that they offered hyperthreading support and thus 2 threads per core) was very well made.

>>721115932 (OP)
Half Life mods

>>721124613
>quickview
I bought one of these pieces of shit decades ago for my modded Xbox and the trash can't even lock properly, making it impossible to use for that purpose.

>>721134291
They're also already phasing out burners which have a much better life than drives

>>721125024
Because the Nvidia slop version of the technology (Scalable Link Interface) was dogshit. The 3DFX version (Scan-Line Interleave) was based as fuck and actually effective.

>>721115932 (OP)
A lot more affordable. Had a generic GPU by SiS back then and, while some 3D models were straight up rendered as garbage, you could find settings that worked for almost any game.

>>721120843
The admin privilege prompts were more aggressive back then.

>>721125024
It was a technology that ran out the clock.
>>721139356
The reason the voodoo version worked was because the voodoo was fill rate limited as were all 3d accelerators of the era. Not to mention the CPU was doing a lot of the heavy lifting for geometry so sending the draw commands to both cards with the intent to render half the fields on one and half on the other "worked like fuck" was the technical term.
But then all the R&D in these new GPU things meant we weren't fill rate limited anymore. The problem was the GPU now did its own geometry and lighting and had to process all those shaders. Now you couldn't just trivially split the frame by field, you had to figure out what to draw that wouldn't rely on data the other card would have, and it was hard to know what chunks were going to be difficult or easy, it was all too common for one card to be overburdened and the other under utilised and then the next frame reverse. So you got utterly terrible frame pacing if you did it raw, or terrible input lag if you tried to smooth out the frame times, and either way there's a good chance your shaders will get out of sync leading to water shaders not lining up depending on which card they were on.

Ironically we can actually do multi-GPU properly now because vulkan and d3d12 were designed around maintaining concurrency since the application developer is responsible for the state tracking. But devs are not interested in supporting it.

>>721138008
>tfw always meme'd LED lights for years
>come time to build me new PC
>everything is fucking black(motherboard, cables, etc.)
>can't see shit even with lights on in the room
>gotta use a flashlight strapped to my head
>look like a tard
>every time I move the my head light, shadows from the cables and other shit cast over the shit I need to see
>look even more like a tard
>all while I think to myself "Boy I wish I had a stream of lights to......oh"
I'm sorry I made fun of LEDfags.

>>721139160
Bulldozer was fine after the scheduling update. I had multiple computers back then and cpus were never the bottleneck unless the game was unoptimized crap.

>>721139160
>Unfortunately, AMD's Bulldozer was a really bad design
I would qualify that as "really bad design for the time" because bulldozer on a proper OS is actually really good. The problem they had was windows couldn't direct threads worth a damn and it meant your poorly threaded workloads were not only starved for single core performance, but windows was sticking 2 FP heavy jobs on the same core pairs for half performance and leaving the rest unused. Intel's hyperthreading had similar issues which was why many workloads recommended disabling it, not because it was bad but it highlighted the fault in windows really badly. They would then remove hyperthreading for a few years before bringing it back for the i7 and twisting the arm of microsoft to do better.

>>721140048
It's almost like Intel had a long history of anticompetitive behavior

>>721115932 (OP)
i was underage so i only played runescape and maplestory and mabinogi
eventuially i also played on private servers of ragnarok online

>>721115932 (OP)
It was amazing, though I was still a kid back then and never had great hardware, plus hardware was still advancing far more quickly. It felt like games with impressive graphics (that would bring my PC to its knees) were coming out quite regularly, as opposed to how it is nowadays when I don't even remember what the last game that truly impressed me visually even was.

>>721115932 (OP)
prebuilt was the only option. it's not like today where manufacturers will follow a common standard and you can throw everything together like legos.
the internet wasn't a good resource if you wanted custom stuff, you have to know someone who did PC repair for a living.

>>721139986
>gotta use a flashlight strapped to my head
Headlamps are a requirement for trve PC building.

>>721116153
FAAAAAAAAAAAAAG

>>721140460
Nigga I built a computer in 1997. My dad took me to a parts expo in 1995. You kids need to leave

If you don't recognize this leave 4chan and don't come back for another 10 years

>>721140460
Tiger Direct and Zipzoomfly existed
I built my first computer in 2004 from parts I ordered online

>>721115932 (OP)
Gamespy and modding ruled the PC gaming industry. Big devs were onions mad about it and so kept a lot of the big titles on console, but in return we got brilliant indie projects and genuine creativity along with some classics. PC gaming died around the time discord started getting big + when normies realized that PCs do everything a console does but more and better.

I lived in a fucking huge empty pyramid

>>721115932 (OP)
My mom had a computer repairman over to fix our PC in 2004, I had a whole grift planned where I'd use the repairman's expertise to persuade my mom to upgrade our graphics card and RAM thinking he'd be motivated by an easy sale. Instead he laughed at me and said I'd never need more than 512 MB until I graduated. Fuck you repairman.

>>721140460
You could build if you lived in a city, but you're right about the lego thing. It was much more finnicky then, troubleshooting drivers and such.

>>721122234
>800x600

Honestly, you didn't need more.

>>721120412
Also how common and viable cybercafes were in some countries. Where I lived in highschool every single male teen would go straight to a cyber after school to play w3 or cs with a decent connection. Basically a daily LAN party where people would exchange files and talk about whatever was new.

>>721121863
I bought an Athlon 3500+ back in 2004 and didn't need to upgrade until 2009 when UE3 titles started to kick its ass.

Then i got a Phenom II 965BE and used that until 2015.

>>721122234
>1024x768
Still my favorite resolution. I never go above it on my retro PCs, even if they have the power to do so.

>>721115932 (OP)
I loved Morrowind, and would go apeshit for Brood War custom games. The FF7 PC port looked way better than the PSX. Emulation was mind blowing. Diablo 2 kicked ass. From what I remember games didn’t have super high system requirements, at least not until Oblivion arrived in 2006. lol piracy existed but my dumb ass had about a 50/50 chance of needing to reinstall windows after downloading “warez” or whatever. I honestly have zero complaints, though if I were to go back in time I’m sure I’d hate how slow HDDs actually were.

>>721140460
This wasn't the 90s, where CPUs and their cache were separate.

>>721121863
I remember the Athlon XPs being competitive and the later Athlon 64s - which brought 64b to PC for the first time - being excellent.

>>721122316
No, they came out at about the same time. They were out in fall 2007, I remember very well because that was when I built my very first high-end PC. It had a Q6600 at its heart, which I had won in a giveaway. I remember reading reviews and drooling over SLI 8800GTs, or 8800GTSs. Ended up getting 8800GTS 512MB in SLI and the newly released, utterly jaw dropping Crysis ran at like 45FPS at 1280x1024, with Very High settings but using some ini changes which enabled most of them in DX9 rather than DX10. Played the whole game like that and was insanely impressed.

>>721125024
NVIDIA killed it not that long ago (with RTX 3000 IIRC) for a variety of reasons, but it can be mostly summed up by saying that it lacked support and that modern game engines were becoming more and more hostile to alternate frame rendering which nigh-on every SLI compatible game ran on.

>>721125147
It wasn't that difficult. All you needed was one of those mobos with an extra PCIe switch chip if you were on a mainstream platform. The bandwidth was only required between the graphics cards, not to the CPU. Such mobos were kinda "special" but were available back when multi-GPU was still a thing. Prices weren't insane either, they were higher end, more expensive, but nowhere close to what a "high-end" mobo (with no special features) costs nowadays.

>>721116961
>gacha didn't exist
MapleStory Gachapons say otherwise.

>>721140460
I honestly don’t see how it was any different back then. Learned to build a PC at 13 in the 2000s and would make a new build every few years after that. Honestly the fucking gigantic GPUs and heat sinks make modern builds far more intimidating than the smaller components of the 2000s. I’ll admit using pcpartpicker today makes confirming your parts are compatible way easier but back then you’d just wrangle someone knowledgeable at the store and ask em. It was basically the same rules, get the right cpu for the socket, compatible RAM, etc… literally the same concerns you’d have when building something today, except again today’s components are fucking huge in comparison.

>>721116153
It's crazy how much people relied on pre-builts back in the day. You could be using a complete piece of shit like pic related that only got 10fps in Oblivion, and you'd still be happy with the performance. That's just how PC gaming was like back in the day. Then internet shopping and DIY video tutorials came into maturation, and now even little kids can put together a budget build for themselves.
Also, I don't think people realize just how convenient modern computers are. If you have something that needs drivers, even a USB mouse and keyboard, you better hope your purchase came with an installation CD or the manufacturer has it listed on the website. Nowadays Windows has a generic driver for just about anything you can plug in, and if it doesn't you can have it grab them automatically.

>>721134291
I'm not sure what you're actually trying to say. The cheapest $/TB drives were like 16TB last I checked, which is far beyond what you can expect a typical normalfag to buy.

>>721139995
>>721140048
I grant that improvements to the scheduler made it more capable, but even aside from that even single core workloads it didn't really have the IPC and it was hot and demanding to get the most out of its higher clocks as I recall. It just didn't stack up to the "Core iX" series which was a admittedly a pretty high bar to clear especially when there was both a mainstream (socket 1156) and high end desktop (socket 1366) variant of Nahalem and then Westmere CPUs

This is a good example though to compare - Windows' scheduler is still frustrating garbage but compared to the old days, not nearly as much or at least fixes come a bit quicker. For instance, the Thread Director 2 update to support Intel "P and E core" CPUs in the 11th gen and newer and AMD's Zen lineup particularly those with 3D cache and 2 CCD's; as I recall some of these changes required Win11 at least to start - I'm not sure if they were ever backported. The other facet is sometimes handled by external non-OS applications, notably the Windows/Xbox Game Bar - for Intel 12thgen+ P/e cores (I think) and AMD 79xxX3D /99xxX3D (definitely), it basically has the Xbox Game Bar define if an application is a game or not, and
>If Game, THEN choose cores from CCD w/ 3DCache extra
Sometimes people talked about that its no longer so cumbersome or maybe Windows has updated, but at release of the 7950X3D without the Game Bar it was a real clusterfuck dealing with heterogeneous cores. Of course, one good thing Intel did was put some degree of load balancing and core/thread usage management on-die, which I really wish AMD would do if they're going to continue this; I really thought the 9000 series would have cache on both CCDs on the high end option. Regardless though, as it was back then and now, Linux' scheduler has less trouble with this because it was written differently

>>721115932 (OP)
We played heroes 3, counterstrike, starcraft, quake, dota, baldurs gate and life was good.

>>721119510
halo wasn't relevant to pc gamers, "halo killer" was only a console ecosystem term

>>721140749
i only know the ut2003 version because i played quake 3 not ut

>>721123062
> get Dawn of War 2 in a box
> please make a Steam account
> please make a Windows Live account
Fuck this shit.

>>721143207
Halo CE was kino on PC

>>721120412
>No porn
oh sweaty summer child

>>721142790
>It's crazy how much people relied on pre-builts back in the day.
I think its about the same now, though I admit that for those inclined to build your own, its...sort of...more accessible? That is to say, lots of case functions we take for granted today, were NOT at all the case back in the day and you had to mod the fuck out of things to get room for extra fans and the like. As far as parts themselves, I think its different but not necessarily easier. Internet shopping was absolutely a thing and I remember ordering from niche PC enthusiast sites, notably FrozenCPU, Xoxide, Performance-PCs (the last of which is still open thankfully and does much of the same stuff). I remeber buying a motherfucking
>Vapochill
at one point from FrozenCPU, when I was sponsored by my university's computer club for a local LAN and overclocking tutorial/contest. For those unaware a Vapochill unit was sub-ambient phase change cooling; the early ones required a custom case, the later ones Lightspeed like pic related came in their own little custom setup that usually went underneath high end cases like those from LianLi (but you could use it with any case provided yu could get the hose to the mobo/CPU).

While these "Specialty enthusiast" things were expensive, relatively loud, powerful, and rare, more conventional hardware like CPUs, GPUs, mobos etc.. were sold not just online at a variety of places, but at computer stores or even Gamestop / Electronics Boutique (I remember getting one of my video cards from an EB back in the day - it was like $600 so it was my 'big' birthday present; can't remember if it was a Voodoo or an early Nvidia / ATI. ). While today Microcenters are sort of the only wide store of their type in many places, we used to have CompUSA warehouse type stores that had actual PCs/components etc, so it was accessible in its own way.

Out of room for the convenience bbit but I generally agree!

>>721115932 (OP)
>2005 was 20 years ago

Man I played hours on ut99's goofy user made assault maps

>>721125024
makes more sense to put in on die

>>721126534
kino

>>721143859
That's the thing, making ever-bigger dies is hard. Making multiple dies instead is a lot easier, so it would be very nice if using multiple, smaller GPUs worked well.

I played this game called operation flashpoint a lot back then. It was like battlefield, except the maps were bigger and it was realistic. The first use of ironsights in a game too.

>>721115932 (OP)
by 2005 it became so shit I jumped exclusively to consoles for a decade. no regrets.

>>721142976
>I really wish AMD would do if they're going to continue this
I really wish Microsoft was competent at software development

>>721142790
>It's crazy how much people relied on pre-builts back in the day.
Ehh not really, I mean back then it was much more new and there were a lot of points of failure due to older designs (pins for connectors that could be bent or snapped easily), and the next roadblock was the early software not being very user friendly; I built a retro PC a little while ago and completely forgot that after you built it you didn't just set the time and some basic stuff in the BIOS, you had to go all-in on IRQ, DMA, and device settings and map them correctly, I actually had to go look up a guide because back when I was a kid in the 90's I would use this stuff all the time, but I completely forgot in the 3 decades since it's been required, so I can imagine for the average person without previous knowledge or any computing experience, then it seems like an insurmountable task.

buying pre-builts back in the 90's meant you bought something that would just get you into the OS and working without needing to learn a bunch of technical lingo

Building a PC is more accessible and guided than ever before, so it makes sense that more people are choosing to build their own now, especially when they learn of the price difference.

>>721115932 (OP)
i remember trying to run crysis on my dads work pc and i ended up frying it lol

>>721143207
>halo wasn't relevant to pc gamers, "halo killer" was only a console ecosystem term
The only thing halo did was ruin multiple shooters for years with 2 weapons only bullshit. Halo sucked then, it sucks now.

>>721144082
i'm guess like sli even having the chips 'connected' is always a problem also they need some kind of efficient way of communicating

>>721138952
yeah it isn't lol it's still overpriced and their market share keeps shrinking

>>721144339
>can't even form a sentence
>just vaguely argues for nvidia
ranjeet please the humans are talking

>>721142790
it was cheap as hell

Budget (eMachines, entry Dell Dimension)
Celeron or Sempron CPU, 256–512 MB RAM, integrated graphics, 40–80 GB HDD
$399–$599
These were “back to school” specials, often bundled with CRT or low-end LCD monitor.

>>721144404
Plus keyboard and mouse and matching speakers.

>>721144286
Yeah, I remember finally trying the PC port of Halo to see what it was like and just thinking it sucked. 2 weapons only REALLY sucked, shield regen shit also sucked.

>>721144336
Yeah, that was the major problem. One GPU does not have fast access to the other GPU's VRAM and this results in problems where they have to share data over a slow interface (the SLI bridge and PCIe). Since the transfer is slow, that means to optimize the process you need to minimize the amount of data sharing and to store everything in VRAM on both cards. The more a game needs to share stuff between GPUs, the less effective it is. Modern game engines use their temporal shit for everything so they began needing to share A LOT of data and as such alternate-frame rendering died.

Vulkan and DX12 both support multi-GPU still, devs could implement it and use multiple GPUs however they like, but nobody actually does it.

>>721115932 (OP)
Emulators and a bunch of pirated shit

>>721115932 (OP)
Guild Wars
Age of Mythology
Warcraft III
Heroes III
Black and White 2
Silkroad Online
Medal of Honor Breakthrough Online
Call of Duty II Online
Fly for Fun
Command and Conquer Generals
Age of Empires III
Rise of Nations
Master of Orion II
Civilization III - IV
Knights and Merchants
Etc

PC gaming peaked here.

>Captcha: XGAYK

>>721120079
>The main problem was that you still had to load everything from disk
Xbox games used the hard drive as a memory cache to preload assets and dynamically read/write data in tandem with the drive, it's similar to how old PC games had a minimal install option so you're loading from two different sources.
>and there wasn't enough memory.
It had 64MB, that's double the RAM of the PS2. Remember, this isn't a PC so it didn't have a multitude of processes running in the background while you're playing a game, and if a game needed more then they could do the memory caching thing from above.
>You had a hard disk but it was tiny and I feel like there must've been something from Microsoft preventing you from installing big parts of the game to it.
The hard drive was 8-10 GB, that was fucking huge for dedicated gaming-only device that didn't need to install data to begin with, and the vast majority of save files were rarely larger than a few megabytes. Most of that space was meant for patches and DLC being downloaded from Xbox Live or demo discs instead, and even those were small enough to the point that you could have just about everything installed on your drive all at once and still have room leftover.

Good times

Maybe I'm just old but there's zero interesting hardware in the PC space anymore. Anyone remember when you could get one of those triple core phenoms and roll the dice on unlocking cores? I got a free upgrade to a quad core from doing that.

>>721144082
Chiplet design for GPUs when?

>>721145124
I remember the PNY GTX 465 lottery where you could potentially flash the board to a 470, but that being said there are still new and interesting components like the Intel Arc cards

>>721122015
what the fuck does that fan cool

>>721115932 (OP)
Games at sub-30 FPS were playable

>>721144921
Gave me flashbacks of finding the download for starcraft broodwar online but it needing a CD key so I would mash my keyboard because the cdkeys were only numbers, till I got one that worked. The downside of this was the real owner of said CD key I had rng'd, he wouldn't be able to play same time as me, and I couldn't hop on same time as him, I was basically cucking his online experience since I wouldn't stop playing all summer since the early morning to night

>>721144564
With Vulkan things could be improved and at this point I'd think that one of the later generations of PCI-E (I saw something today about PCI-E 8.0 standards being tapped out and an x16 slot having 1 TB/s bidirectional! ) could implement some changes to make sharing resources easier. Same thing with additional power delivery from the slot, given that the fucking 12VHWPR / 12V2X6 cable continues to have some...design flaws for real world usage. I think this kind of stuff only works when they're widely supported with open standards, to get people onboard. Like, I saw a notice about Asus developing a custom PCI-E slot that can deliver 250-300W just through the card itself (which is enough to run lower and some mid grade cards without cables at all!) but if its a one off thing that requires a compatible mobo and GPU,then it will be a curiosity for a generation or so but not much more. Same thing with the long term implications of
>External GPUs, Thunderbolt / USB4
There's been a lot of eGPU stuff over the years - I remember laptops that had special custom connectors that would connect to their desktop GPU caddy, back in the 2000s. However that shit doesn't really work. We started to see the most usage when Thunderbolt came along with PCI-E 3.0 and above. However, it still had some limited performance for awhile as the bandwidth was equivalent to say, PCI-E 3.0 x2 or x4. Now with stuff like Thunderbolt 4 or 5, and USB4's equivalent and compatible-with-Thunderbolt mode 40Gbps and 80Gbps bidirectional, that makes external GPU performance even better ( as well as being able to do both power delivery and DisplayPort 2.x+ standards over USB-C ) so hopefully that will be something that can be implemented wider today, along with supporting multiple GPU given both hardware and software support capable

>>721145476
chipset

>>721124132
Because it was still in its infancy. You know how people bitch about xbox live and how it normalized paying for online play no don't bring up MMOs they don't count in their eyes? Well, Xbox Live actually worked properly and was fully integrated across the entire platform. Steam wasn't like that, it was very hit or miss as far as system compatibility went and was actually a bit of a resource hog for people running less than 2GB of RAM. You also have to keep in mind that back then it was still completely normal to buy your PC games physically and be able to run them off the disc or with a partial installation. Now here's Steam telling you to install an extra application and log into their online service just to play a game, even if it was a single-player game. It was yet another form of DRM that PC gamers had to contend with, and the 00s was when DRM was at its peak.

What was DX10 like?

>>721142790
I built my PCs during that time and it was way cheaper back then compared to nowadays. I'd say prebuilts are way more competitive now especially during black friday sales or some shit.

>>721124132
hl2 bloatware

>>721115932 (OP)
>Fable
>Fear
>Halo
>CoD was a good game
Great times to be honest

>>721115932 (OP)
Fun you just had to be there Alliance of Valiant Arms or ava crossfire wolf team drift city Rakion the list goes on and on

>>721145904
After DX9 , particularly 9.0C was a big one as it added shader model 3.0 support (both pixel and vertex) and improved a lot of stuff, adding atop DX8.1 and moree. For a long time it was sort of "the" API for gaming. DX10 was controversial as it
>Required Windows Vista
Now, there were complex backport fuckery that could be done, but there was no offfical XP support for DX10 and that pissed a lot of people off. There were a LOT of changes to DX10 that were predicated on Vista's driver model and design, as well as some changes like focusing on XInput instead of DirectInput. So there was a lot of new stuff and new ways of doing stuff, as well as a requirement of a new OS and that made some people annoyed. Later DX10.1 would come out and update some features, but it was the first version of DX that was not 'backward compatible" the way that DX9 and previous had been, thanks to its overhaul, Vista dependency, and more

>>721125913
Because bigger fans means bigger cases. 120mm is just big enough to cover a full height expansion card without causing the PC's dimensions to get larger.

>>721117886
It went for the dudebro market. The people who used to make fun of nerds. That laid the foundation for normalizing and popularizing video games, with all the consequences we're seeing today - monetization above everything, corporate bloat, slop, normie meddling, politics, etc.

>>721146598
all the leftoid politics comes from the people that used to cry about dudebros

>>721115932 (OP)
Even back then I built my own pc with what little money I had as a student.

>>721146647
Dudebro pandering should be rightly shat on unless you're one of the people addicted to slop and cosmetics. This is /v/ so of course you are. You're probably playing gacha right now.

>>721146647
Everyone used to cry about dudebros. We didn't want them in vidya. Of course nerds had a leftist tendency because they were a marginalized group and rightoids were traditionally critical of video games. But ultimately, politics were largely a non-issue and mostly became one because of normies and outside actors who saw that video games could be used to influence people and to make politics. The leftoids who used to be ok with vidya then started coming after them and the rightoids who used to laugh about them and consider them satanic saw their chance and started coddling the demographic.

>>721138008
I been looking for this meme forever

>>721146815
Do dudebros even play gachas

>>721147743
They were responsible for normie slop and fueling microtransactions.

>>721146460
>>721127819
>>721125913
>why 120mm
Because it lines up with the 3,5 and 2,5 drives correctly, which affected the decisions that went into the standard format for things as CD drives

The bigger question is why 300mm or 400mm isn't a standard for the door.

>>721124045
It was perfect. Always my target resolution, though for some games I had to go down to 1024x768.

>>721123978
We were just used to it, back then. I can't stand 30 FPS nowadays, but back then 30 FPS felt perfectly fine in many an FPS. When you get used to better things, the good things of the past start to seem bad, and the bad things even worse.

>>721115932 (OP)
Me, I was emulating ps1 mostly. And I think Fable and Black&White 2 came out. Gta San Andreas was a big one of course.

>>721123062
Absolutely not. Nostalgia is fine and all, but GFWL was always complete fucking dogshit and whenever a game I was looking forward to required it, it was like walking into an unflushed toilet stall.

>>721145476
The southbridge chip, if I'm not mistaken.

>>721146247
Sounds familiar...

I was wasting my high school years away in FFXI on my PC.

>>721150712
The good ol' days when the CPU didn't have to do so much shit for the motherboard itself.

i was SOVL or dare I say... SOVLDAT

>>721125268
man my parents old pc looked just like that on the inside, all the way down to the coolermaster cpu cooler

I think discovering my older brother's copy of Mech Warrior 4 in the year 2000 and the insane joy stick controller you needed to play it was when I first fell in love with video games

>>721115932 (OP)
Early 2000's was when copy protection in PC games got so god damn bad that everyone voluntarily migrated to Steam because even permanently locking your games to a single account was a better solution

>>721126128
>mandatory
lol I don't know a single person with that shit

>>721140749
instagib or bust

>>721151967
You sound fucking retarded.

>>721119770
>>721122229
>computer nerd dad
lucky, my dad was a cheapskate luddite who hates computers to this day
you grew up on easy mode. you didn't beat the game.

>>721115932 (OP)
It really wasn't that great, consoles were better.

>>721153128
Consoles were never better you petulant tart.

>>721118823
>why
Because those pesky economic terrorists would not accept their liveservices as well as they loudly promised in every shareholder meeting
Making 99% of their IPs vomit rainbows and prideparades didn't exactly help sales either

>>721147632
its all yours now bro, cherish it

>>721147776
k.,

>>721119718
Too bad the sequel sucked ass.

>>721120412
>No porn
lol, half of the time on LAN parties was always spend waiting for the copies of eachothers porn HDs

>>721144174
Zooming near ground and between the trees in a heli was my favorite past time for a while. Super fun flight model.

Great.
WoW was unbelievable. It made me quit using IRC and ICQ and solely rely on my WoW friends list

>>721152936
thanks, I was doing a (You) impression glad to see I nailed it

>>721115932 (OP)
Lot of minor pains in the ass modern that PC gamers won't have to do deal with, and that literally nobody will be nostalgic for, like hard drive jumpers, IDE ribbon cables, and literally every PSU being the "ketchup and mustard" rat's nest that was next to impossible to cable manage. We still had cases with clear side panels, but most were useless for cable management, so if you wanted a clean-looking PC, you pretty much needed a Dremel.

>>721124516
>Seagate
>still works
lol

>>721115932 (OP)
For $1000 now you can play the lat 25 years of PC games. Back then for $1000 you could play vice city and ut04 on medium. HDD, CRT, a full minute startup time. It was never good we did the best with what we had.

>>721116565
The blizzard games until wow were just insanely good, you could feel the passion in them.
Now everything is cashshop-slop, but we all knew this would happen after the activision merger.

>>721157629
WoW was the real life ruiner. That's the game that changed me from someone who plays 3 hours a day to one who plays 16.

Gaming in 2005 was brought to me via a Geforce FX 5200. What an atrocious little card.

Track Mania Nations Forever. <3

I still play it sometime.

>>721116961
you're wrong that's all gay tech shit the games sucked. these were all the things you could never do on pc.

-No fighting games
-No action games like DMC,ninja gaiden, only horrible ports
-No sports games
-No final fantasy, smt, tales, trails, dragonquest
-No from soft games
-basically no japanese support period
-Everything delayed forever, then when it comes its shit (GTA:IV)
-almost no modern racing games. No revenge, takedown, pgr, forza

Back then in 2005, we had orange box.

>>721124045
I still have it as my second monitor
Perfect for old vidya

>GTX 1070 8GB

How fucked am I?

>>721115932 (OP)
rts or fps thats it
the ps2 was a better deal back then

>>721115932 (OP)
iunno
i was mostly playing flash games and a handful of old AAAs like NFS 4/5 at that time

>>721115932 (OP)
I built my very first pc around that time just to play WoW because my old toaster couldn't get past 10 fps in BWL. Before that I would play a ton of RTS games. I wish I could go back in time just so the internet wouldn't be so shiteater infested.

>>721119390
citizen kabuto
montezumas return
trespasser
outcast

its not actually a hardware thing, it was the 97' ‘Efficient Bump Mapping Hardware’ paper that introduced the improvement over blinn's 72' paper. it enabled any hardware that could do phong shading to do normals. it takes time for people to adopt state of the art technique.