That game was so good and around that time, people were figuring out how to get HL2 to be multiplayer in story mode, and gmod was in its infancy right around then.
Good times.
And now two short decades later we're paying 10x the amount for top-tier cards, and HL3 still isn't out.
I think mine came with Vietcong, which was... underwhelming.
I still listen to it on occasion. Don’t even remember how I found that song because I’ve never played that game, I don’t think.
Also, I remember that quote (from Gabe himself, I think): "We may have polished graphics further, but that game won't be Half Life anymore.", a direct stab taken at linearity of Doom of that time.
Of course, 'theoretical' hardware limitations aren't hard limits -- they're soft[ware] ones. However, if you find yourself battling concrete hardware limitations, what you need is to put your back into it and a little know-how.
Valve said "Ha, let's see!" and implemented great HDR visuals with integers only. So it's not just let's hack together and see how it goes. IIRC, it took three re-implementations to get it right and performant.
Similarly, I'm not a stranger when it comes to hardware and its limits, but what deemed impossible by many, even knowledgeable people, doesn't mean it's a hard, cold truth (e.g. demoscene and PoC||GTFO).
AMD Duron 1800+ and 256mb of 333MHz DDR and the damn thing ran HL2!
A machine with a 50eur CPU and 50eur GPU ran it! They must have optimized it well.
And that machine is included in that 2004 Steam hardware survey. :)
Nvidia seemed to like to take their old hardware design and crank it up a bit, slap a new version on it and sell it as a budget offering. No new features, but it did a respectable job of playing older games which is what I think most people want out of a cheapo card. Later offerings usually featured super cut down cards that had more of the new features but not really enough power to actually turn them on and get playable framerates. And that is how things have sort of gone since then.
Like you said, the GF4 MX440 was actually a decent performing card. Sure, you were stuck with DX7 rendering path but it did a good job with it.
Crazy. It was crazy.
If I remember correctly you needed Shader model 3.0 support to get those fancy graphical effects which required GeForce FX series & 6th Series (6600/6800 etc).
But what did you do back then? I was pretty young, but I'm not even sure you had such a clean programmable separation in the render pipeline? :-)
You'd probably do some cute register combiner trick for the texturing. You can kinda think of register combiner stages as pixel shader instructions. And in hardware of the time they're the same thing. On GeForce 3, loading a pixel shader is just blitting the register combiner hardware config registers all at once. GeForce 2 could have had a shader model version 0.5 or something with only four instructions if they wanted to expose it in the API like that.