Playing Half-Life 2 on a 3D Phantom XP 2800: A Journey into Nostalgia

YouTuber Budget-Builds Official conducted an experiment to see if he could run Half-Life 2 on the Pine Technology 3D Phantom XP 2800 graphics card. He succeeded, but the visuals and gameplay left much to be desired.

The Pine Technology 3D Phantom XP 2800 is a video card equipped with 8 MB of SDR (Synchronous DRAM), supports DirectX 6, has a power consumption of 3 watts, and was manufactured using a 250nm process.

Initially, Budget-Builds Official launched the game at a resolution of 640×480 with low-quality settings. The XP 2800 managed to achieve around 10-15 FPS, occasionally hitting 30 FPS. According to the creator of the video, Half-Life 2 tends to crash on systems with limited video memory, and in this setup, it would crash every five minutes.

By disabling all graphical enhancements in the settings and lowering the resolution to 320×240 pixels, Budget-Builds Official was able to push the frame rate up to 60 FPS. The game stopped crashing and became more stable, but the image quality resembled that of games from the 1980s.

On March 18, 2025, Orbifold Studios released a demo of Half-Life 2 RTX on Steam, featuring playable areas set in Ravenholm and the Nova Prospekt prison. The game includes new models, detailed textures, enhanced VFX, and an impressive level of detail as shown in the screenshots. The standout feature of this project is its advanced ray tracing, which alters lighting and shadows.

Half-Life 2 RTX is an unofficial remaster of Valve’s original title, developed by a team of modders utilizing RTX Remix tools, with support from Nvidia. In this updated version, developers have manually recreated textures and models in high quality.