- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
I'm wondering if Bungie should be more honest about what the minimum spec for Halo 2 should be, since the result of Halo 1's unrealistically low minspec is no doubt in part to blame for all the people who say "Halo runs badly on my PC, it lags big time, it sucks". To refresh your memory, it's quoted as:
733MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, 32MB 3Dcard, 56K modem
Now seriously, anyone who knows anything about computers knows that's a load of monkeynuts. Watching Halo on that computer would be like watching a slideshow because of the framerate. I think it would have been better to have stated the minspec for which Halo would have run acceptably well, on medium graphics settings, therefore avaoiding the consequent flaming Halo PC (and for some reason Gearbox) have undeservably gained, for example:
1.0GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 64MB 3Dcard, 256K DSL
Does that seem about right? That's not exactly a high-spec PC by this year's, or even the last couple of year's standard. A PC like that wouldn't exactly cost much now either. If Bungie had made it clear that you'd need a PC like that to give Halo a fair chance of running well, I think we PC gamers would have a lot weight of opinion when we're forced to defend our beloved game from people who don't understand or don't care for understanding computers.
This brings me to my point: Halo 2's minspec. Bare in mind it's going to have DirectX 9 graphics, which means lots of bump-mapping and specular light effects. And we're PC Gamers so we're talking resolutions of 1024x768 minimum, probably 1280x1024. Based on this, I predict bungie will say the following:
1GHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 64MB 3Dcard, 64Kbps
That happens to be FarCry's minspec, and since I hope Halo 2 will be graphically somewhere along those lines, I expect it'll claim to need the same kind of spec. Although we all know that it's going to need something a little more along the lines of:
2 GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, 128MB 3Dcard with full Dx9 support, 256/512 DSL
Chances are Bungie won't be honest about that though. Anyone with a spec lower than that is no doubt going to suffer. And then they'll come on here and tell us how badly Halo 2 was made, and how the Xbox version looks better, and how the PC version has bad netcode, how Gearbox sucks, blah blah blah.
...Monkeynuts, I say.