- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
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.