- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
OK, here's what a game designer in training has to say about this:
Playing on a multiplayer map for halo PC, you could not exceed a triangle count of 50,000 per map. that was the max, and if a mapper put any more triangles into a map, it would not compile or be turned into a map because it would be too detailed for the game. but most maps stay under 30,000 triangles because not everyone has that high-end $1500 gaming PC you built/bought. this helped to support maps on a wider variety of computers.
Halo 1 and Halo 2 both had very graphic differences- yes. But they were both made for a $200 gaming rig called the Xbox. Bungie used a crapload of different shaders, textures, and a little bump-mapping to make Halo 2 look good. Halo 1 was just any other game. for the time, the graphics were nothing.
Polygon count/ triangle count in a video game is the big thing that will determine your framerate. In halo 2 the triangle count is nothing too spectacular to tell the truth. but considering how long it's been in the development process, they might have taken the poly-count on some of the maps up a little.
but the necessity of a 256MB video card? Well, to tell the truth, eh... yeah I sort of agree with it. If you remember how it all looked in-game, it was pretty scratchy. Some movie sequences where the sceney appears before the master chief. then we have multiplayer where for no more than a couple of seconds after the beginning you could see simple geometry without the textures on them. If you had a better video card, it would probably load all of this stuff faster. I'm not too sure though. I'm not the A+ certified technician, I just work with the software.