why is halo so slow on my computer?

[Sid59]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
halo is special.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Halo is a crappy port

Play the Xbox version and the PC version side by side and then try and say that with a straight face.

Does everyone here understand what it means when you say 'bad port'? It sure as hell doesn't sound like it.

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: hans007

i guess i will try all these fixes you guys say. i personally do not think it was such a bad port. i mean on the xbox its basically a p3-733 , running with a gf3 or gf4 running it at 640x480 so i can understand that my video card is a bottleneck. especially since im noticing a lot of you guys who say it runs fast, have 9700 or 9800 cards, but a comparable cpu

XBox also runs it with a lot of features turned off, and has it capped at around 30 fps.

I played over the summer on a P4-2.133/Ti4200 64MB and it played fine at 1024x768. The one item that made a major difference performance wise was luster. Everything else was trivial (no AA/AF though).

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by an Athlon 64 1600 Mhz because there's no such thing... Athlon 64's start at 2.0 Ghz. Unless you mean an Opteron.

Sure there are, don't you remember the 2800+ skt754 E.S. that sites were previewing? Here's one from X-bit link and I'm thinking this is the one he has, but I did see another up for grabs there too awhile back

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by an Athlon 64 1600 Mhz because there's no such thing... Athlon 64's start at 2.0 Ghz. Unless you mean an Opteron.

Sure there are, don't you remember the 2800+ skt754 E.S. that sites were previewing? Here's one from X-bit link and I'm thinking this is the one he has, but I did see another up for grabs there too awhile back

yes that is the one i have. that guy was well a flake and an ass btw. im not going into details but i'd say everyone should put him on the do not trade list.

 

[L1FE]

From what I remember, turning off specular lighting increases the performance dramatically? Then again, this was before the patch. Personally, I just stick to the xbox version since I like the controls better

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker

is hardly what I'd call anything but a bad port

If you have a piece of software that can complete a given task in ten seconds on one platform, and it is ported to another platform where the same task takes five seconds using directly comparable hardware, do you call that a bad port? That is what you are doing with Halo.

I don't own an XBox, so obviously I can't try it out, but Im assuming it runs halfdecently well, otherwise I'd say it's just an all around crappy game.
Not to mention, if I spent $60+ on a game that my XBox couldn't run acceptably, I wouldn't feel to good abou it.

Is it slower on the XBox than a high end PC? In that case I'd say there isn't a single platform out there that can play it at acceptable speeds unless you drop detail levels enough to make Quake III look better.

MercenaryForHire
Following a previous discussion about Halo's performance, I downloaded the official demo, I'd assume that doesn't have this problem, if it even exists, and it was just as slow.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: dexvx

Originally posted by: hans007

i guess i will try all these fixes you guys say. i personally do not think it was such a bad port. i mean on the xbox its basically a p3-733 , running with a gf3 or gf4 running it at 640x480 so i can understand that my video card is a bottleneck. especially since im noticing a lot of you guys who say it runs fast, have 9700 or 9800 cards, but a comparable cpu

XBox also runs it with a lot of features turned off, and has it capped at around 30 fps.

I played over the summer on a P4-2.133/Ti4200 64MB and it played fine at 1024x768. The one item that made a major difference performance wise was luster. Everything else was trivial (no AA/AF though).

not exactly, from what i remember after the release of the game, the developers did explain tha tthe xbox chip did have some advanced features that made it faster then you'd expect.

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: L1FE
From what I remember, turning off specular lighting increases the performance dramatically? Then again, this was before the patch. Personally, I just stick to the xbox version since I like the controls better

wow you are right.


1024x768, hi particles, hi textures, with everything else on , no specular, is significantly smoother and faster
than 800x600, low particles, low textures, everything including specular on

 

[BenSkywalker]

I don't own an XBox, so obviously I can't try it out, but Im assuming it runs halfdecently well, otherwise I'd say it's just an all around crappy game.

Framerate never exceeds 30FPS and it rarely gets that high. Calling it crappy kind of leaves out the gameplay portion which most people due tend to find more important then the graphics engine

The Halo rendering engine sucks IMO, although it is what many people seem to think they want. It is a shader loaded game that stops relying on textures and starts putting that more advanced hardware to use. In that aspect Halo is hands down the best engine to hit the PC to date. The game runs much better then TRAoD(and looks better too).

Not to mention, if I spent $60+ on a game that my XBox couldn't run acceptably, I wouldn't feel to good abou it.

Only paid $50 for mine. The performance isn't that far out of the norm. It runs better then GTA3 on the PS2, the most popular game in the last couple of years across all platforms. When you are using a controller, you don't miss the framerate nearly as much as you do on the PC with mouse and keyboard. Don't get me wrong, one of Metroid Prime's big advantages over Halo was that it ran considerably faster and significantly smoother(talking GC MP vs XB Halo), that said the game still kicked @ss slow or not. It would have been better with better framerates, one of the big reasons I picked it up for the PC.

Is it slower on the XBox than a high end PC?

Hell yes, a LOT slower.

In that case I'd say there isn't a single platform out there that can play it at acceptable speeds unless you drop detail levels enough to make Quake III look better.

Leave everything cranked in terms of features and drop your resolution down to 640x480. You should be seeing well over 100FPS+ as the norm(over 300% faster then the XBox). Does Quake3 look better? In terms of the traditional sense probably yes, it runs very fast and due to the speed you can crank the resolution and AF/AA and play at very crisp settings. None of the graphics cards have close to enough power to do that in Halo, the shaders are simply too demanding.

This is the future that a lot of people think they want for PC gaming. When you hear all the hype about shaders, Halo is the best example to date of what current level shaders can do on the PC. Half-Life2 uses shaders as an accesory to an engine that looks incredible without them, so the game ends up looking significantly better then a game that looks like crap without any shaders(anyone can try it for themselves in Halo, it looks real bad withou shaders). DooM3 is Carmack, and I can't fault anyone for not being up to his level in terms of building a graphics engine(noone is, apologies to Tim if he reads this ). That said, Carmack took DX7 level features and did as much as he could with them(obviously the end result is stunning).

Bungie obviously could have done better with Halo's engine had they been given more time, but the limitations of the XBox are part of the reason why there isn't a good 'fallback' when you disable shaders(which would have made most people happy with the PC port). They couldn't use a bunch of high res textures, not when they only have 64MB of total memory to work with.

Anyway, when you hear all the hype about pixel shader heavy games think Halo. When HL2 hits people will see the game still looks incredible without them, and D3 is using GeForce1 style features allowing for much better performance, Halo is the best example, performance and visual wise, of a shader heavy title. IMO, it is worth dealing with the very low res and playing through the game @640x480, really one of the best shooters to hit in years(if not the best). Have to play it on either Heroic or Legendary to enjoy(otherwise it is way too easy), but certainly a killer game.

 

[Sunner]

I don't really find Halo all that stunning graphically speaking, especially not if running in 640x480 on my 21" monitor.
As for gameplay, it seemed like it would be fun, but it's just too slow to be playable, even for a relatively slowpaced single player shooter, sub 20 FPS is entirely unacceptable.
When I tried it, I dies all the time bebasue of the slideshow it turned into when a bunch of NME's showed up.

If they can't do a better job than this at implementing shaders, they should leave them out, seems to me like they were included for the sake of having shaders more than anything, especially seeing as Max Payne 2 looks better(IMO of course), and plays worlds faster at all resolutions.

As for the norm, I don't know what it is on consoles, Im no console man, but framerates like Halo's, or anywhere near it, are unacceptable for just about anything, and if I should pick up a PS2, XBox or whatever, only to find games unplayable due to low framerates, that XBox would be going back to the store right away.
Graphics can't make up for gameplay, but slow framerates can sure ruin the gameplay.

 

[BenSkywalker]

I don't really find Halo all that stunning graphically speaking, especially not if running in 640x480 on my 21" monitor.

It's a bit of a tricky subject IMO. I think when the NV40/NV50 are out people will likely be of the mind that Halo looks better then MaxPayne2, right now the problem is MP2 can be played at very good framerates with everything cranked including res and AA/AF while Halo most certainly can't.

As for gameplay, it seemed like it would be fun, but it's just too slow to be playable, even for a relatively slowpaced single player shooter, sub 20 FPS is entirely unacceptable.

You should be able to play @640x480 and never drop below ~50FPS, I rarely dip in to the 30s on a GF4.

If they can't do a better job than this at implementing shaders, they should leave them out, seems to me like they were included for the sake of having shaders more than anything, especially seeing as Max Payne 2 looks better(IMO of course), and plays worlds faster at all resolutions.

Check out MP2 on the XBox compared to Halo and you might see why they did what they did For most XB games even Quake3 level textures aren't realistic, not to mention you are stuck running @640x480(well, the Xbox can do 1920x1080 interlaced but only if you have a 1080iHDTV so devs target 480p). You take away the ability to handle large textures and you don't have a lot of options outside of shaders if you don't want your game to look Quake2 era. Halo is looking to end up selling around 5Million units on the XBox, maybe more then that, while it would be extremely lucky to hit one tenth of that on the PC. The game engine was built for the XBox, and then that game was ported by GearBox to the PC. As it was, there were a lot of POd people at the amount of time it took GearBox to port the game, it would have taken a lot longer if they had to rebuild the engine from scratch and rework all of the art assets(they would have had to pretty much make a remake of the game, not a port). Given the job that GB was given, I think they did a very good job. I can't think of any ports that run better on the ported hardware then they did on their native platform comparing like hardware.

As for the norm, I don't know what it is on consoles, Im no console man, but framerates like Halo's, or anywhere near it, are unacceptable for just about anything, and if I should pick up a PS2, XBox or whatever, only to find games unplayable due to low framerates, that XBox would be going back to the store right away.

Dealing with TVs you have a hard limit of 60FPS, you can never exceed that(disabling VSync on a TV is very, very bad- TV encoder chips don't exceed 60FPS for anyone wondering). Almost all games run with a cap @30FPS to make it smoother- there aren't many exceptions to that either. It may sound horrible, but take away a keyboard and a mouse and you don't notice it nearly as much as you would on a PC. You can not pull off a fast spin on a console game, there isn't anyway due to the control limitations so the most noticeable situation of poor framerate is gone pretty much right away. Obviously you will still notice it, that is the reason I have Halo for the PC and why I'm going to pick up KoTOR soon also(have that on the XBox too).

There are certain genres of games that simply play better on consoles even with their limitations, racers and fighters being the two that spring quickly to mind. 'GTA' style games also seem to play much better on the consoles(Simpson's Hit and Run I have for the XBox, and despite being a lot of fun to play, I wouldn't be interested in the least playing it on my PC).

Graphics can't make up for gameplay, but slow framerates can sure ruin the gameplay.

Slow performance can certainly hurt gameplay, so can a lousy control interface. Halo suffers from both of those on the XBox(nothing they could have done about the controls, they did the best they could there), it actually is much better on the PC in both aspects. I'm looking forward to playing Halo on my PVR5/NV40 as soon as they are released so I can crank it up and enjoy it with high res and decent performance.

 

[hans007]

i actually think its pretty damn good looking. i had to turn specular lighting off, but its pretty playable at 1024x768 now.


i suppose the only reason i really want it to run at 1024x768 is that i have an lcd, and it takes up the whole screen that way (or at least the center since i have a widescreen).


the effects are great, and the textures aren THAT bad, if you have them set to high. when the textures are set to low, it is not that great. but i guess the main thing about this game i like is the gameplay and the story.

i know there are other better lookign faster games, but ive tried them and they just dont ... i dunno suck you in like halo.