Halo 1 & 2 for PC
This topic has moved here: Subject: help!!! laggy gameplay
  • Subject: help!!! laggy gameplay
Subject: help!!! laggy gameplay
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I have a 256MB ATI based Xtasy AGP8x 9600series graphics card and can't find a setting that runs Halo smoothly, can anyone please help. I thought a high grade card would have enough power. I also have 768MB DDR and am running a P4 2.4MHZ processor. What's the deal, can anyone help, is there anyone out there that can solve this puzzle for me. PLEASE HELP!!!!! o/s- WINDOWS XP-home ed.

  • 06.07.2004 4:22 PM PDT
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go to gearbox's faq

  • 06.07.2004 4:34 PM PDT
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can you give me a link

  • 06.07.2004 6:01 PM PDT
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You got a good setup there. The game isn't laggy because of your video card, but its laggy because it was a Bad Port

  • 06.07.2004 9:25 PM PDT
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Go here

There's some really good info on there about performance tweaking. If you scroll down, there's a huge post by PATRIOT about tweaking all the settings.

What settings are you trying to run at? Big performance drains are running in high resolution (try turning your res down) and specular. If you play a lot of games with explosives (all rockets in Prisoner, for example), then turning off decals will help a lot. You won't see any blackened explosions on the walls, but your framerates will be much better. Specular is a big drain on the indoor levels like Damnation, so turning that off would help. Also, you can force your card to use an earlier Pixel Shader version. To do this, right click on your desktop shortcut to Halo and select Properties. Then click on the tab that says "Shortcut". And then where it says Target, add one of these flags (with the hyphen) after the quotes:

-useff (forces your card to use fixed function. Ugly but it's good for older cards)
-use11 (forces your card to use Pixel Shaders 1.1)
-use14 (forces your card to use PS 1.4)
-use20 (forces your card to use PS 2.0)

With a 9600, I'd try either the 1.1 or 1.4 shaders. Experiment and see which is faster for you. You'll need to quit Halo and restart it between changing those flags (i.e. -use11)

But all of that is explained in the link I gave you. Go through that and you'll probably find a few things you can do to boost your performance.

  • 06.08.2004 7:53 AM PDT
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About the lagginess, it actually might not be how Halo is set up, but might be your actual system (especially Win XP) For my suggestion, you should go to http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=review&dId=32 4 . I have personally used all of these tweaks and tricks on my comp (PIV 2.5 w/ radeon 9200 128ddr, 512pc3200) and it significantly improved my framerates as well as slashing startup time and overall comp performance. If you follow the guide to the T, nothing should be to hard. If you just want to work with halo, i would suggest not running your resolution higher than 800*600 for best results.

  • 06.08.2004 5:43 PM PDT