The PS3, which had hardware a bit ahead of the curve when it launched in late 2006, had a whopping 512MB of RAM.
So 2GB would have been relatively beefy specs in comparison when The Orange Box released the following year. 4GB would be excessive.
I recall the PC I built in 2011 for Skyrim had 4GB of RAM and I thought that was great at the time. A lot of games (Skyrim included) were 32-bit applications at launch and were limited in terms of the total RAM they could utilize, so 4GB was the cap for a lot of titles until 64-bit support became more commonplace.
I remember the first PC I built to play Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind, which I installed to my amazing 40GB hard drive. I think Morrowind alone ended up using 10GB of that with all the mods I had.
My current computer has 32GB of RAM, so I have almost as much RAM as I used to have storage back then. I could save Morrowind plus mods onto a RAM disk if I wanted to and just play the whole thing on memory.
When I was a kid, we used to have to walk uphill, in snow, somehow both ways, to figure out which voodoo configuration of DMA, IRQ, and free vs high memory settings was needed to be able to play a game.
The PS3, which had hardware a bit ahead of the curve when it launched in late 2006, had a whopping 512MB of RAM.
So 2GB would have been relatively beefy specs in comparison when The Orange Box released the following year. 4GB would be excessive.
I recall the PC I built in 2011 for Skyrim had 4GB of RAM and I thought that was great at the time. A lot of games (Skyrim included) were 32-bit applications at launch and were limited in terms of the total RAM they could utilize, so 4GB was the cap for a lot of titles until 64-bit support became more commonplace.
Jesus christ I forgot what dark times those were. Just checked and indeed min memory was 512MB for Half life 2
Goddamn kids these days don’t know how good they got it (ignoring all the other stuff going on right now)
I remember the first PC I built to play Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind, which I installed to my amazing 40GB hard drive. I think Morrowind alone ended up using 10GB of that with all the mods I had.
My current computer has 32GB of RAM, so I have almost as much RAM as I used to have storage back then. I could save Morrowind plus mods onto a RAM disk if I wanted to and just play the whole thing on memory.
When I was a kid, we used to have to walk uphill, in snow, somehow both ways, to figure out which voodoo configuration of DMA, IRQ, and free vs high memory settings was needed to be able to play a game.