14 DAY TRIAL // Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter developed by Valve that was released back in 2004. It has recently been ported on the Linux platform.
We have put together a small comparison screenshot tour between the Linux and the Windows versions of the game.
Valve released their Steam for Linux client for quite some time now, and some of their titles have been ported for the open source platform. The heavy hitters from their catalog, Half-Life 2 and the two episodes, took some doing from Valve's part.
The game is built on the Source engine and, at the time of the original launch, it was a very demanding title. It needed a powerful computer to enable all the options and it remained a standard for long while.
The first Half-Life had support for Direct3D, OpenGL, and Software (the rendering was done strictly by the processor). The second game in the series had only Direct3D and OpenGL support, and it took Valve almost six years to port it for Linux.
As it can be easily observed from the screenshots below, the differences between the two versions can be barely distinguished.
You have to keep in mind that the Direct3D version has a lot more technologies behind it, even if the game was launched in 2004.
Surprisingly, the necessary requirements for Half-Life 2 are pretty similar for both platforms. Even if Valve hasn't released the official Linux minimum and recommended requirement, they should be pretty close to the ones for Windows.
Minimum System requirements:
• 1.7 GHz Processor • 512MB RAM • A Graphics Card that has at least support for Shader 2 • Mouse • Keyboard • Internet Connection
Half-Life 2 also has support for Steam Achievements and Steam Cloud, not to mention the fact that a Source SDK is probably on its way.
It's impossible to tell when the game will exit Beta, but it seems to be pretty stable. We tested the game in Ubuntu 13.04 (Precise Pangonlin) 64-bit, with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU processor and a Nvidia 260 GTX graphics card.
Half-Life 2 on LINUX (Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit)
Half-Life 2 on Window 7 64-bit
