Halo [PC Ports]

I was going to say Welcome to 2004, but Ike already covered that.
 
I was a little curious about the findings from that DF Retro video some months ago, thinking that a lot of the effects may have been broken by more recent hardware and drivers. So I decided to try the game on a period correct system, specifically a Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 1GB RAM and a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra with WinXP I have laying around.
Well, as it turns out, no matter the shader model or other settings, these features are indeed broken compared to the original XBOX version. I find this quite disappointing as I always considered this port very demanding in the first place, so to not even include all of the features is a let down. Anyone ever figure what made it so CPU and especially GPU intensive?

Just for kicks, while I was playing Halo on that system, which ran alright for the most part, I also tried Doom 3 which was giving the system a very hard time. Surprisingly, Half-Life 2 (with DX 8.1 though) ran really well on this system, it was a fairly fun experience at 1024x768. I was certainly impressed!
 
I was a little curious about the findings from that DF Retro video some months ago, thinking that a lot of the effects may have been broken by more recent hardware and drivers. So I decided to try the game on a period correct system, specifically a Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 1GB RAM and a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra with WinXP I have laying around.
Well, as it turns out, no matter the shader model or other settings, these features are indeed broken compared to the original XBOX version. I find this quite disappointing as I always considered this port very demanding in the first place, so to not even include all of the features is a let down. Anyone ever figure what made it so CPU and especially GPU intensive?

Just for kicks, while I was playing Halo on that system, which ran alright for the most part, I also tried Doom 3 which was giving the system a very hard time. Surprisingly, Half-Life 2 (with DX 8.1 though) ran really well on this system, it was a fairly fun experience at 1024x768. I was certainly impressed!
Incompetence, perhaps? Gearbox has a history of it...
 
halo_1024_pure.gif


This is an old chart from XBiTLabs from an article they did where they tested most 2004 GPUs with popular games of the day. This is pretty bad, although there were worse contenders such as Deus Ex : Invisible War.
Unfortunately, the site's been dead for some years now and the archive is incomplete so I can't show you the performance on the higher resolutions.

Of note, 6600GT destroys the top end cards from the FX line. Remember when sub-200$ mid-range parts were very competitive with the previous gen's top end :)?
 
Man I played this game's campaing for the first time on PC back then. Then I replayed it on MCC on a One.
Damn it, I never got the actual true experience. In fact, I'm one of those guys that was bothered by the fact that H1CE on MCC (which really is the 360's anniversary eddition) rendered the graphics at native res when on OG mode. Fuck me, but I like playing retro games on the exact same resolution they were originally developed for.
 
pretty sure halo use pixel shader 2.1 which the 5900 didnt support
I believe to run halo on max quality requires an ati 9800 pro or similar

I don't think that's true, but I'll keep it in mind for future tests. Want to get a 6800GT at some point for that system, so I might try it then :).
 
Gearbox implemented some of the shaders in 2.1 for the original port eg reflection & bump map shaders were proper calculated interpolation in PC vs a table lookup in Xbox.
NV did some shonky stuff with shader replacement because lol Geforce FX.
And there were a couple of Catalyst versions where having Aniso enabled (forced in drivers) broke the reflection shaders.
I'm not convinced it looked as bad as OP is showing on ATI so suspect NV still got some broken shader action in their drivers.

I was rather hoping the MCC version would be running a port of the original game into whatever engine they're using to do the later titles rather than based off Gearbox port :|
 
So the mcc is gonna make halo as close to the og xbox as possible on pc?

After reading this I went over to my moms house and tried to find my original pc halo disc. I found the box but the game wasn't in it! SO SAD.

Anyway looking forward to this, thanks for bringing it to my attention lol.
 
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