The thing I see here is, is that HL2 was designed with lower-spec machines in mind,
HL2 was designed to scale down gracefully on lower-spec hardware, but by no means was it a design target. There is a very visible aesthetic difference between playing HL2 (or any other "Source" games) on the DX9 renderer, compared to the DX7 one.I definately agree with RocketGnomes asseration that Mark Reins problem is that he wants customers that don't have a 2:1 (or better) graphics card to computer ratio. Unfortunately that goal is somewhat incompatible with other goals of the Unreal Engine, including but not limited to "We have a large investment in out existing code base, and do not feel we want to make any significant changes to the original (flawed) design".