Halo 1 & 2 for PC
This topic has moved here: Subject: Halo PC Is Sloppily Written
  • Subject: Halo PC Is Sloppily Written
Subject: Halo PC Is Sloppily Written

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  • 11.16.2004 4:10 PM PDT
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Halo PC has the worst netcode EVER. There is a delay time, and if two people are running side by side and one shoots in front of th other person, the other person will die though on the person who is shooting screen no bullets hit them but they died.
I have a 9600 Pro 256mb and 512 mb pc3200, and a AMD Athlin XP 3200+ and i can only run it at 800x600 with high graphics. Its really blocky.

  • 11.16.2004 4:49 PM PDT
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Ok one at a time. If you run Halo at 640x480 then yes it will look crap. That's not Halo's fault, just about any game at that resolution will look crap. I run it at 1280x1024, which looks twice as good as the xbox resolution. It sounds to me like you either don't know what graphics card you have, or even more likely, you don't have one at all. this would explain your poor framerate. Again, this is not Halo's fault, you need a graphics card for just about any game made in the last few years. 256Mb of ram is not very much. Even 512 is minimal. I have 1024, which is fine. MOH:AA is older than Halo, so it's system requirments are less. However, if you ru Halo on a semi-decent system, it looks much better than either xbox Halo or MOH. One last thing, Gearbox didn't write poor code. It's just people expect miracles when they don't have good enough hardware to run games how they're meant to be seen.

  • 11.16.2004 7:34 PM PDT
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FarCry has the worst netcode ever. Halo suffers no lag what so ever if you have medium to high speed broadband, and if you play on dedicated servers with low ping. Try adjusting your filters to find such servers. Private servers are usually more laggy. It sounds like your connection is the laggier of the two if you're the one who usually dies first.

Your computer is not that high-spec, even if you might think it. ATi's Pro cards are the budget version of their better cards, and so the performance is likely to decrease. XT cards are the better versions. It's worth pointing out that the 256Mb of ram on the card counts for nothing if the GPU isn't up to the job. Your system ram and CPU seem fine, so it's very likely your graphics card is slowing your gameplay down. Although your card does support directX 9 effects, it does not do so nearly as well the the 9600XT or 9800 series cards. This may be the result of your 'blockiness'. Another reason might be your graphics card drivers are installed incorrectly, or not updated. Check ATi's website (www.ati.com) for new drivers. The last alternative is that your graphics settings are wrong. 800x600 is a low resolution, 1024x768 would be better if you can achieve it. Disabling features like Decals and Texture Detail, while making the framerate increase, do considerably reduce the look of the game. My suggestion to you would be upgrade your graphics card, update your drivers, or play around with graphics settings.

  • 11.16.2004 7:42 PM PDT
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Sorry to disagree skippy but:
Even though u do need sufficient hardware, true, as an engineer it's easy to see that Halo's code is by far not optimal.
This is sort of inevitable by the way it's designed:
first on pc then for xbox and then ported for pc by gearbox. This is almost promising non optimal algorithems. Working on software in parallel with a group of teams is very hard. 2 groups of teams even harder.

Yes u can still make it good by totally boosting your hardware power but you are not using it optimaly:
u can count to 10 by adding twice and subtracting once (it could be safer:-)
but u will need to count faster then someone who is just counting to ten the 'normal' way.

[Edited on 11/17/2004 10:19:39 AM]

  • 11.17.2004 10:14 AM PDT
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Skippy you are correct, 256 is NOT enough ram. If your to cheap to pump it up with more ram then try a clean boot that may help.

By the way Skippy love racin with ya.

  • 11.17.2004 10:29 AM PDT
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Fair enough ospreypandion, porting in general is a bad idea since it only ever works if done from scratch, which Halo evidently wasn't. However, I must stick by my claim that Halo works fine on a medium-high end PC, as the majority of people who accuse it of being problematic are people who don't understand PC gaming, like not knowing what a graphics card is, or thinking 256MB of ram is a lot. While it's not their fault that they don't know these things, it's also not fair to blame Halo or Gearbox for failing to do the impossible. The one thing which you can blame them for is putting the minimum system requirements stupidly low. 733MHz cpu? double that at least. 128MB ram? triple it. 64MB Dx8 card? Fine if you like gameboy graphics. If they were actually honest about what Halo needs, and published it on the box in an area larger than that of a postage stamp, then maybe less people would be disappointed. I'm still amazed that games like Doom 3 and HL2 promise outstanding, amazing almost photo-real looking graphics, when 80% of PC's will struggle to run the game on medium settings.

  • 11.17.2004 12:29 PM PDT
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Heyyo,

Yeah, optimizations are weak, HaloCE was better but no longer supported (even more weaker) and NOT combining HaloCE and HaloPC is ghey. BF: Vietnam's v1.2 patch is like 257MB, I diddn't care, I downloaded it. If you're on dial up? pay a bud with high speed internet $5 to download it and burn it onna cd... not that hard.

Sure, the netcode's not the best, but not the worst either, after some time once can easily adapt.

Xbox may have some optimizations due to no OS, or a very basic built in one, but my pc beats it with raw power, so my PC should technically be able to play Halo in all ways better than xbox, but yes, due to incomplete optimizations this is not true...

Proof that the game was rushed and never complete is even visisble: look at the jackals and stationery shields, they DON'T change color when attacked, never got implemented...

  • 11.17.2004 12:32 PM PDT
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your comp is playing slow most likely because you have the detail settign too high. Whenever I have details set higer than medium it gets really choppy. It helps if I make it normal sized screen but widescreen grunt blasting is just too kewl

  • 11.17.2004 2:07 PM PDT
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Heyyo,

Like Ekitty said. If you have a Gefore 4 MX440, DON'T crank up the graphics, cause that's retarded. The card can barely keep afloat, don't crush it...

  • 11.18.2004 10:00 AM PDT
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I have a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 HT processor, an 7200 RPM hard drive, 1 GB of ram, an GeForce FX5600 card, and a 56X CD-RW drive and Halo still runs slow, any suggestions, how to fix this? Also, if it it will help the game run faster, how do you clean boot?

[Edited on 11/18/2004 1:24:16 PM]

  • 11.18.2004 12:55 PM PDT
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WTF! WERE U HIGH WHEN U WROTE THIS! dude listen. Graphics: Kick-ass, even on crappy machines (ESPECIALLY compared to Medal of Honor). Secondly: WHAT DO THE GRAPHICS HAVE TO DO WITH THE WRITING?

  • 11.20.2004 6:10 PM PDT
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i think i know what's wrong. open halo. click on prefrences. chose viedo display set everything to high/on.

  • 11.20.2004 9:45 PM PDT
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The ATI RV350/RV360 VPU (Radeon 9550/9600) series fully supports the DirectX 9 specification, and pixel shader 2.0

Also, since my card is OC'd , it outperforms the normal 9600 Pro, it benchmarks close to an XT with Omega 2.5.90 drivers installed.

Also, 512 Mbytes of system ram is more than enough for Windows XP. 1 Gbyte is nice but over the top. Also, doubling system ram from 512 to 1024 has no performance impact on games.

For the guy with the FX5600, your video card is the reason the framerates are choppy. Halo needs a fast comp to play, though you should be able to get good to acceptable framerates on 800x600 resolution with all graphics settings turned on and maxed out. Set the framerate to Vsync



[Edited on 11/21/2004 1:27:04 AM]

  • 11.21.2004 1:17 AM PDT
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It looks good on my computer.

  • 11.21.2004 2:29 PM PDT
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Posted by: wazzledoozle
Also, 512 Mbytes of system ram is more than enough for Windows XP. 1 Gbyte is nice but over the top. Also, doubling system ram from 512 to 1024 has no performance impact on games.

True for Halo, but for games like FarCry, Doom 3 (possibly) and Half-Life 2, you most deffinately WILL notice the difference with 1GB of ram.

  • 11.21.2004 4:01 PM PDT
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When playing a game, the only system ram used is how much the AGP aperature is set to in bios. IDSoft has said that 512Mbyte of dedicated video ram for Doom 3 would be required to play it maxed out (with a very nice vpu)
So with 512 Mbyte of system ram, and 128 Mbyte or 256Mbyte of video ram, and the AGP aperaure set correctly, 1Gbyte of system ram would not have any performance impact.

  • 11.21.2004 5:26 PM PDT
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Not true. The AGP aperture should be set to the same amount of ram as is on your card, for example 128 for a 128 and 256 for a 256 card obviously. The statement made by Id that the game would run best with a 512 aperture is true, although there is yet to exsist a graphics card with 512Mb of onboard ram. When you play a game like FarCry, the maps exsist as 'physical' data as well as graphical. Yes the graphics card decides what they look like but it does not decide whether they are solid, how big they are, wether there are passable or what type of noise should be made when a player walks over it. The graphics card does not store the information of what enemies should do when they see you, or how many bullets your gun will fire if you hold the trigger down for 3 seconds. All this kind of non-graphical data is stored usually on the hard drive, and for faster processing is held in the system ram. If you use up all your ram loading half a map, your computer has to unload some of that data and re-load the bit it needs from the hard drive, which takes time, longer than if the entire map could be loaded into the system ram at one time. This is why games play faster on PCs with more system ram - because there is a lot of data to be processed besides graphical. Therefore, 1GB would make a game run smoother than 512, because the computer doesn't have to empty and re-use it as often. This is especially noticable in games like FarCry and Half-Life which have huge maps.

  • 11.21.2004 6:21 PM PDT
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The AGP aperature should nto be set to match the video ram- The Aperature size is how much system ram the AGP card is allowed to use.

So, if you had 256Mbyte of video ram, then an ideal setting would be a 256Mbyte aperature. Of all things in a game, textures and sounds take up the most space. This things are stored in the video ram, therefor 256Mbyte+128Mbyte sytem ram for the AGP card would be ideal since other components that are offloaded into ram go into the system ram, these thiongs would non-graphical data and dont use much ram.

Only next generation games (post-doom3) will need 512Mbyte dedicated video ram with 128-256 Mbyte aperature of system ram, and a total of 1 Gbyte of system ram.

  • 11.21.2004 6:34 PM PDT
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dude you need at least 512mb of ram and u need a 256mb graphics card. and maybe a faster prosseser.

  • 11.21.2004 7:17 PM PDT
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Heyyo,

by written he means the code, it's not fully optimized, it's been said before. "Fast Shaders" from HaloCE was better, but still needs summore optimizations, cause for a 2001 game built for Dx8 it sure saps the crap outta my comp.

And as for RAM? yes you will notice the difference between 512 and 1gig on newer games, old ones no cause they only require for optimal preformance 512 or less. REMEMBER, times are changing, requirements are increasing, in all aspects. This's how it's been in the past, and it's still continuing. Quake 3, people needed 128mb for smooth gameplay, quake 4 will probably require a gig, or maybe a gig and a half for smooth gameplay (once it actually gets released... if it does...).

As for the Nvidia FX5600? yes, it's that card, it's crap. I had one, sold it off to my ex-landlord cause he's a comp n00b, lol, and bought myself a ATI Radeon 9600 PRO, and you'll feel the difference, like 10F/S difference off the bat, and that nvidia card hates flashlights, my ATI one barely flickers, but the nvidia card seems to like the particle effects more, just not high-quality bump-mapping rendering, and massive amounts of polygon rendering...

  • 11.21.2004 10:39 PM PDT
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Uh how about no DUH to you all.

  • 11.21.2004 10:41 PM PDT