Finely polished for a wide range of hardware

While Team Fortress 2 visuals don't immediately jump out looking as such, even the latest and greatest video cards have plenty of work for them if you push the textures to Very High and jack up the rest of the settings. On the other hand, such hardware is not required - merely taken advantage of, should you have it.

Close to minimum settings, but still recognizable and perfectly playable on YouGamers minimum system.

Mixing Medium/High settings - most systems out there today can run the game like this.

Almost maximum settings - the YouGamers recommended system allows you to play like this.

On a system meeting the publisher's listed minimum, the game looks fairly basic, but it does run, and it's still playable. The YouGamers minimum system allows you to play at 800x600 resolution at a very smooth frame rate with most of the settings around medium (without HDR/Bloom). The recommended setup is what you need if you want to play at a high resolution with HDR effects and high resolution textures. The range between YouGamers minimum and recommended system is unusually large simply because Team Fortress 2 scales pretty much as low as you want to push it. In fact, just about any DX8-level card will run it - it'll just look a fair bit uglier on the low end hardware, and when you go below the YouGamers minimum setup, you will start seeing issues with the frame rate; and in Team Fortress 2, if you are skipping frames, you are a bag of free points for the rest.

The game offers four levels of texture resolution;.Low is there pretty much just for GeForce 3s and other similarly truly old DX8-level cards. Any model a little more recent can use at least the Medium textures and High is what you can run on a modern system, with Very High there for those who have the latest hardware with plenty of video memory to fit it all in. An ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB can happily push Very High textures, but if you seek a solid 60fps frame rate even in the thick of things, High is still a valid choice.