- Gearbox, Bungie and Microsoft care about our customers and our products. We are committed to supporting Halo PC.
- We have noticed some people wondering about performance scores with Halo PC and we have some information and news about that.
- Halo PC includes a timedemo feature that was designed to help hardware enthusiasts do benchmark comparisons between different hardware configurations with Halo PC.
- While the feature is very precise, it?s not very accurate. In other words, the numbers are real, but they don't mean what you think they mean. The numbers during time demo are affected by debugging software that was used by developers to optimize memory consumption and rendering performance. The numbers are also affected by shortcuts in providing the feature, such as not discriminating between time spent rendering versus time spent loading each of the scenes in the time demo.
- Since the game?s launch, we?ve noticed that many users are not using the timedemo feature for comparative benchmarking, but as a gauge of their own system?s performance in terms of average frames per second performance of Halo.
- The numbers being looked at are therefore inaccurate for that purpose.
- So, we?ve decided to change the timedemo features so that it can be better used for the purpose of gauging performance.
- First, we removed per-frame memory checks that were hampering performance during timedemo testing. We no longer need these checks for memory optimization and they were only affecting your memory adversely.
- Second, we eliminated load times from the calculations as they were being counted towards the amount of time elapsing even though the game was halted and wasn?t rendering any frames.
- Finally, we improved the output messages to relay this information precisely and accurately.
- The end result for us is that in our configuration testing (limited to just a handful of video cards and computers), we saw anywhere from 30% to 60% increased in frames per second reported by time demo scores.
- These changes will be included in the next update (along with some other cool improvements).
- The next update should be released within a week or so, but please wait for an official release date to be announced before holding us to it
Thanks! Now get back to saving the universe!