- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Heyyo,
All I can say is this: intergrated graphics suck, even PCI cards do better. Here's a chain of the evolution of gpu's:
Intergrated > PCI > AGP > PCI-Express
There's some really old kindof bus between intergrated and PCI... but I'm not sure they used graphic cards for it... I think for graphic cards they skipped it... correct me if I'm wrong people...
As you can see, you're at the start, or the bottom of the evolution chain, get up to AGP if you can, that's the most popular one right now, but inna year PCI-Express will replace it... it already has begun doing so. ;)
For $50? you can pickup a geforce 4 mx440, which allows you to play the game with a pretty steady framerate, but the game looks horrible. Like, worse than games made in 1999 (Quake 3 Arena looked MUCH better than HaloPC when HaloPC's set to forced funcion... btw, Q3A was Forced Function too (just Transform&Lighting) but the texture files were much more high quality than the ones in HaloPC).
If you can, try to at least get a Geforce 4 TI4200 cause that card runs many games very nicely, sure, no support for pixel shader v1.4, but Halo was never quite designed for pixel shader v2.0 to begin with people. And then? skip the rest of the cards between the TI4800 to the FX5700, cause all the videocards in between were horrible, and not worth their cash. But the FX5700? that card's good. Runs good, but bad pricing, too expensive. You can find a ATI Radeon 9600 PRO that runs HaloPC about the same as the FX5700 (according to tom's hardware guide... http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-0 9.html) and at least $50 CDN cheaper than the FX5700 (that is if you shop for the right manufacturers of the cards).
So yeah, there's my 2 cents man, hopes it helps you out on your decision. For Low-End cards? the geforce 2 is great for pricing, almost as good as a geforce 4 that costs like %40 more than the GF2... for budget cards ATI's better for FramesPerSecond - to - price...