Ep 2 requires DX 8.1 hardware at the minimum. Portal too, probably. That card is too old.

Maksiii wrote on 2024-07-02, 10:52:

Another thing, I accidentally broke a capacitor/accumulator on my GPU (at the tip, near the end), could that have anything to do with this issue?

That's not good. How bad is the damage?
I don't think that's the cause, but it could lead to other problems. Probably shouldn't keep using it with a bad cap.

Ep2 & Portal came with the "Source 2007" version of the engine which dropped DX7 Support. I had nearly the exact same setup in 2007 and was disappointed when I couldn't play EP2, Portal or TF2!

Oh, I really thought my card was DX9 compatible and Ep2 had the same requirements, I probably looked at the wrong website for specs at the time 😒

The capacitor just came clean off, still has the 2 connectors attached and is intact. It's a "2c 220 6V", the card has a bunch of these.

Thanks for the reply and help anyway 😀

Besides, the MX440 is from 2002 and the game came out late 2007 (the year of Crysis!). You wouldn't get a decent frame rate out of it even if it was compatible.

Ovenchips wrote on 2024-07-02, 11:39:

Ep2 & Portal came with the "Source 2007" version of the engine which dropped DX7 Support. I had nearly the exact same setup in 2007 and was disappointed when I couldn't play EP2, Portal or TF2!

Yeah! I wish there was a hack like the "CPU patches" to remove instructions for modern games to be able to run on old CPUs. One can dream... 😁

My first "modern" PC had NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440 and Intel Celeron clocked at 2 GHz. It was OK for older games of the time. Everything newer had to be kept at low resolutions and those games couldn't be get to look as intended at all on that card since it was stuck at Direct3D 7 feature set.

My next PC was a proper gaming PC with ATI Radeon HD 4890. I was blown away by amount of stuff I was missing in the then already older games. Some observations I recall, Far Cry actually looked beautiful instead of the pixelated mess, reflections on various characters' armor in Halo: Combat Evolved, properly looking energy ball in Half-Life 2: Episode One inside citadel, visual fidelity difference between Call of Duty 2's DirectX 7 and DirectX 9 modes looked like night and day (though some of us still preferred DX7 mode for online play to get crazy high frame rates and responsiveness).

Of course, I finally got to play Half-Life 2: Episode Two as well! Who else carried that gnome from beginning of the game to the rocket at the end??

I messed around with the DirectX versions under a more capable PC and I got interesting results.

I am using my other PC with Windows 7 & a GeForce 1060 and if I launch HL2 EP2 in "+mat_dxlevel 10" which doesn't exist, the game will still launch, play like normal and claim the running DirectX version is 6.0 (I attached a picture of the render).

After this, I tried to run in any other mode like "+mat_dxlevel 100" or "-dxlevel 100"... or above the game will crash with the same message I got in my XP machine (I need Pixel Shader 1.1 to run).

Like XP, at some point after trying new modes, even 80 it would just crash immediately, mat just didn't work at all and dx_level wouldn't run anything other than 90/95.

At this point I tried "dx_level 90" and the game finally loaded.
After that, I tried 95 & 100 which work just fine.
Trying 110 & 120, the game still registered these in hardware mode even if not "compatible" but after setting all graphics to high and changing the resolution from the default 4:3 to 1680x1050, the game reverted back to DirectX 7.0.

Now I wonder, does it work under 6.0 and 7.0 because it's some sort of DirectX "emulation" compatible with the game requirement of 8.0+ or what gives? 😁