Requirements
Will it run?
THUG2 came out in 2004, so on any machine made this decade the processor and the memory are not what decides this. The graphics driver is. This page tells you whether yours works before you spend half an hour finding out.
On Linux, you need a Vulkan-capable GPU
THUG2 speaks Direct3D 9, which Linux does not. We translate it with DXVK, and DXVK renders through Vulkan and nothing else. If your GPU or its driver cannot do Vulkan, the game does not start. There is no software fallback and no setting that works around it. This is the single thing most worth checking before you begin.
Windows is exempt entirely. It still speaks D3D9 natively, so the game runs with no translation layer involved and your graphics driver never enters into it. A machine far too old for Vulkan can still run the Windows lane.
Macs are effectively exempt too.The same translation happens, but it reaches the GPU through Metal, which every Mac running a current macOS already has. You cannot change a Mac’s graphics card and you do not need to. Your only real requirement is macOS 12 or later.
By platform
Windows 10 / 11
Nothing to checkAnything that ran the original game
THUG2 is a Direct3D 9 game and Windows still speaks D3D9, so it runs natively. No translation layer, so nothing here depends on your graphics driver.
Steam Deck
Nothing to checkAny Steam Deck
The Deck's GPU and drivers already do everything needed, and always have. This is the one platform with no hardware question at all.
Linux desktop
Check your GPU driverA Vulkan-capable GPU with a working driver
This is the only platform where your hardware genuinely decides it. AMD and Intel are the easy cases: our setup installs the Mesa drivers for you, even on a machine with no Vulkan beforehand. NVIDIA is the fiddly one, covered below.
Mac (Apple Silicon or Intel)
Check your macOS versionmacOS 12 Monterey or later
Your GPU is not the question here, since every Mac that runs a modern macOS can do what we need. Both Apple Silicon and Intel are supported. No Mac has geometry shaders, so we ship a DXVK patched to work around that on either chip.
Older NVIDIA cards, specifically
NVIDIA is the fiddly one on Linux, because the right driver for an older card is often not the newest driver. Roughly where the lines fall:
GTX 750 Ti, 900 and 10 series
worksMaxwell and Pascal, 2014 to 2017These are fine, but they need the legacy 580 driver branch rather than the current one. On Fedora that is the RPMFusion “Legacy GTX 800/900/10” packages; other distros ship an equivalent. It is actively maintained.
GT and GTX 600, 700 series
probably notKepler, 2012 to 2014Kepler's last driver is the 470 branch, and the DXVK we ship needs a newer one than that. The driver is still maintained, so the card is not dead in general, it just cannot meet what the translation layer asks for.
GT and GTX 400, 500 series
noFermi, 2010 to 2012No Vulkan support at all, and the 390 driver branch is end-of-life. Tested rather than assumed: a GT 610 was refused outright by the driver on a current kernel.
If your card is too old, the Windows lane still works, because it needs no Vulkan at all. And if you get one of these running that we have marked doubtful, please tell us, we would rather be wrong about this in the generous direction.
Check your machine in a minute
On Linux or Mac, this lists the GPUs Vulkan can actually see. If it names your graphics card, you are fine. If it says Found no drivers! or lists only llvmpipe (which is software rendering on your CPU), the game will not run properly yet.
vulkaninfo --summaryOnce Revert is installed, its own check covers the same ground and everything else besides. It only reads, never changes anything, so it is always safe to run.
./revert doctorDisk space
Allow about 10 GB free. That is more than one copy of a 2004 game because we keep two: your untouched original, and the built edition made from it. Rebuilding always starts from the clean copy, so a mod can never corrupt your only version of the game, and an update can rebuild from scratch without asking you for the files again. On Linux and Mac add roughly a gigabyte for the Wine runtime we download for you.
If something is wrong
The game will not start, or opens to a black screen
On Linux or Mac this is almost always Vulkan. Run vulkaninfo --summary. If it prints “Found no drivers!”, your GPU driver is missing or your card is not supported. revert doctor reports the same thing in plainer words.
It runs, but it crawls
You may be rendering on the CPU, or on the wrong GPU. If your machine has both an integrated and a discrete GPU, DXVK picks the discrete one by default, which is the wrong choice when the discrete card is the weaker or worse-supported of the two. revert doctor flags this, and revert run qol --gpu <name> overrides it.
NVIDIA on Arch or Ubuntu, and it will not start
If your card is Turing or newer and you do not have native Steam installed, you may be missing the 32-bit half of the NVIDIA driver. THUG2 is a 32-bit game, so it needs it. On Arch that is lib32-nvidia-utils; on Debian and Ubuntu it is libnvidia-gl-<version>:i386, matching your installed driver version.
Still stuck
revert doctor prints exactly what is present and what is missing, and it is read-only, so it is always safe to run. If that does not sort it, revert report gathers the whole picture into one file to attach to an issue.
Reporting it
If none of the above sorts it, one command collects your GPU and driver, how far the install got, and the last thing the game printed, into a file you can attach to an issue. It strips your home directory and username out first.
./revert reportIf it worked fine, that is worth reporting too. Most of what we know about unusual hardware came from someone who ran it once and said so.
Ready to go? Pick your platform and install it.