Performance: The other contentuous issue surrounds performance: people have heard the specs and are cursing the fact that they'll have to upgrade for Lost Coast. The key point to understand is that HDR and Lost Coast are independent of each other. HDR has been added to the Source engine and the performance hit is managable: between 10-30% perhaps, though we will be conducting a thorough benchmarking test later this week on both ATI and NVIDIA-based cards. If you can already play Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike: Source at a decent framerate, you should be able to enjoy Day of Defeat: Source with HDR at a decent framerate.

Lost Coast, on the other hand, is a single-level technology showcase that features HDR as one of its many party tricks. It features very high resolution textures, and improved player models: the infamous Old Man on the docks is approx 6,000 polygons compared with around 3,000 for a Half-Life 2 character. These are the reasons why Lost Coast has relatively high system requirements.

Initial systems: However, all is not lost, if you excuse the pun. The system used to demonstrate the game to us today was an Athlon 64 3800+ with 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 6800GT - high end for many people, but not stratospheric. If you needed further proof, the 1024x768 2xAA screenshots featured in this article were taken on a 1.6Ghz Centrino notebook with only 1GB of RAM and an aging 128MB FireGL graphics card. True, it ran at 10FPS at High Detail, but it was playable enough to appreciate the overall achievement.