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Bring Back Rocket Race!!!
Posted by: Jenkiz
Why the hell are Halo 2's Video Card requirement so high ? This game was released in 2004 ! I remember playing it on the Xbox hoping to, one day, play it on the PC.
The PC port was released in 2007 though so naturally the requirements would be higher than the Xbox version. Most PC's today including laptops can handle Halo 2 Vista now.
But the reason why the requirements are higher is because aside from the improved high resolution textures, Halo 2 Vista also uses a completely new shader model version than the Xbox version. Plus, the engine has been updated and optimized to run on DirectX 9 rather than DirectX 8.1 on the original xbox. All of these improvements significantly increase the system requirements of the game compared to the original xbox version.
Now of course, you're right, the game still does have pretty high system requirements. Games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which I believe has better graphics than Halo 2 Vista don't require such a powerful graphics card. So, I'd say the game's graphic engine is a bit inefficient, probably because it's completely based off the original xbox version and thus was not optimized for this.
Now on the other hand, the requirements might be reasonable. Assuming Halo 2 took the full power of the xbox to run, the game's system requirements would've been something like this:
Intel Pentium 3 or Celeron @ 733 MHz
64 MB RAM
64 MB Video RAM
Those requirements don't seem like much, but 64 MB Video RAM is kind of a lot for average PC's back in 2007. Plus, since the game's graphics are significantly updated in the PC version, those specs can be doubled or even tripled. Therefore, if it's doubled, 128 MB video RAM would be required which was pretty high for computers, especially laptops back in 2007 or pre-2007. Actually, the requirements of Halo 2 Vista are about double of the xbox version. The RAM is tripled probably because of Windows Vista and Games For WIndows Live.
But yeah, that's why. Hope that answers your questions.