Half-Life 2 is still far from the achievements of Doom, which has already been launched on potatoes and on a cardboard box. To run the second Half-Life, more advanced equipment is still required – the enthusiast decided to test its performance on the Raspberry Pi 4. The game “slowed down”, but it worked quite stably.
Videos posted on Reddit show Half-Life 2 running on Raspberry Pi 4 and Apple M2 Macbook Air. User zbios says the purpose of the demo is to see if the Valve Source engine can run on the ARM platform.
On Raspberry Pi 4, the game does not run very fast. The modder managed to achieve 15-20 frames per second. The process used a mix of low and high settings at 720p. In 1080p mode, FPS drops to 10 fps. Despite the low performance, the game on the Source engine turned out to be quite stable and workable on Linux for ARM – which was what needed to be proven.
The project was made possible by a Team Fortress 2 source code leak in 2018, which led to the then-current version of the Valve engine being freely available on GitHub. The code turned out to work on all ARM operating systems except Windows, which allowed zbios to port Half-Life 2 to the Raspberry Pi 4.
The enthusiast subsequently adapted his build for the Apple M2 processor. The game worked much better on it, which is not surprising. The number of frames reached 300-400 per second. According to zbios, Portal conversion should also be possible, but comments on the GitHub page indicate that Garry’s Mod is not available for this purpose due to a specific engine modification.
Successful demos raise the question of whether Valve will be able to offer ARM versions of Source-engine games on Steam in the future. Such games could include DOTA 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Portal 2. Perhaps these games will be added to the extensive list of those that already work on the Apple Silicon system logic in the future. In addition, in 2018, NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios released Android versions of Half-Life 2 and Portal to run on NVIDIA Shield, proving them to work on ARM.
Valve is working on Counter-Strike 2 – probably a beta test of a new shooter on the Source 2 engine will start at the end of March
Source: tech spot
