The menus are hard to read, but you should still be able to click on New Game, and remember to quick save and quick load with F6 and F9. Half-Life 2 should start up, and you should see a notification from GeDoSaTo telling you the game is downsampling to your monitor’s native res. Right-click the game in Steam, go to properties, and then Set Launcher options. The easiest way to set the resolution, then, is to do it through the Steam launcher. Unfortunately, Half-Life 2’s menus don’t scale at all, which means once we run the game at 8K, they’re tiny, hard to use, and largely illegible. Also make sure your monitor’s native resolution is set under presentWidth and presentHeight. It should be listed and enabled by default. For 8K, that resolution will be 7680x4320.

In GeDoSaTo’s settings, make sure you have the resoultion you want to downsample from listed under renderResolution. Leave those set to false (they are by default). While I’ve seen other users claim Half-Life 2 needs GeDoSaTo’s mouse cursor modifiers enabled, I found that using them just created problems for me, and made the menus unusable. The game is already listed in GeDoSaTo’s whitelist, and it works with the default injection method. Now download GeDoSaTo, which we’ll use to downsample Half-Life 2. If you want to customize any of the keybinds, do that, too. Now go into the advanced settings and crank up all the graphics settings to your liking: you should probably enable multi-core support, bloom lighting, anti-aliasing, and the highest texture settings possible. Once in the game, go into the graphics menu and set it to your default resolution.

Install Half-Life 2 on Steam and run the game-there are a couple settings we need to tweak before we get into downsampling. We used Durante’s GeDoSaTo to hit that resolution, but other gamers have successfully run the game at up to 15120x9450! For playable performance on an average gaming rig, we’d recommend downsampling from a more conservative 4K or 8K. And 8K isn’t even the highest resolution that the game supports. The same goes for its character models and animation. Without any modding whatsoever, some of Half-Life 2’s textures hold up incredibly well (as long as you don’t look too closely). This week’s Pixel Boost takes us back to City 17 at the sharper-than-ever resolution of 7680x4320-a bit better than the 1024x768 that was common in 2004. We’ve already written about the best mods to use if you go back to Half-Life 2 for a nostalgic replay, but that’s not enough to celebrate Half-Life 2’s tenth anniversary. It’s hard to believe, but Half-Life 2 is now well on its way to being a teenager.

Half life 2 4k