Source: Half-Life Fallout

TweakGuides.com has put online a very detailed guide on how to get the most out of Half-Life 2. The guide contains lots of tweaking information, console commands and mush more to help you play Half-Life 2 the best on your system. Here some words:

Model Detail: This setting controls the number of polygons used for objects in the game. There are three settings - Low, Medium and High – click the screenshot comparison above to see the difference in detail. Note the shape of the good Doctor's head, and the bar to the left of the orange tanks in particular. The Low setting provides the best performance, however objects and in particular characters will seem much more angular and less realistically "filled out". The Medium setting provides more polygons to smooth out character appearances, and objects contain more detail, but FPS is reduced. The High setting provides the most number of polygons and hence the greatest realism, but at the cost of a noticeable FPS drop particularly for lower-end graphics cards.

The full article can be found here at TweakGuides.com.