You know, I don't think the Halo PC port is badly programmed

they added a server browser.

they could have added motherfucking co-op. /me is still pissed that he can't play Halo co-op... not like the framerate would let him, but whatever.

 

its all hd speed in HL, I got a raid 0 with 2 seagate 7200rpm 8mb cache drives and the load times are done as soon as they start, if you blink you miss the load screen!

 

Lol, the xbox co-op implementation has EVERYTHING to do with architecture. Here's a hint, the co-op capability in Halo xbox is completely separated from the networking model. Gearbox COULD have ported single machine splitscreen co-op rather trivially but how many pc users would have been happy with that? Can you say 'Zero'? 'Porting' network co-op is another matter entirely since xbox halo doesnt HAVE networked co-op to begin with.

 

Two years they had. Entire games are developed in that time. I don't know it would have been beyond their means. Co-op just isn't that highly thought of by developers and is often axed, and seeing how lazy Gearbox were with the rest of the conversion, this is hardly surprising in this instance.

 

They had far less than 2 years, in fact more like 9-10 months. They haven't began the porting until late 2002, depsite the game being out on the Xbox for a while. Search for news conserning the Gearbox deal and you'll see...

 

You know, I still have a video I downloaded a while back, proclaiming how blazingly fast Halo would run on a GeForce 2 GTS. And the game looked exactly the same in that video, if not better. Now, I struggle to get playable framerates @ 1024x768 with blocky character models and blurry textures. Sounds like poor programming to me. Especially since the port took so bloody long.

 

That 320x240 video you watched (and think looks as good as Halo today) was of halo before it had any pixel shading and bumpmapping whatsoever. Basically it had the rendering requirements of Quake3.

 

The pixel shading and bumpmapping were both ugly and poorly implemented. If the game would have looked better without them, they why include them, other than to eat up the framerate?

When Gearbox responded to the poor performance by saying "It's doing a lot" (ie, it has many DX9 effects going on), I responded with "Who the bloody hell cares what it's doing? It still looks ugly and runs like a 3-legged dog."

Programming a game has never been about tossing in more bells and whistles that do little more than slow the game down. It's about using little tricks and techniques to make the game look good and run good. UT2003 is a DX7 game that looks and runs infinitely better.

By the way: The size of the video doesn't change the fact that the game was supposed to run extremely well on a GF2 GTS with the majority of the models and textures exactly the same.

If they decided to add a bunch of DX9 effects such as pixel shading and bumpmapping, and they bogged the game down *that much*, then they should have left them out. Or programmed them to perform better. The inclusion of them, then, was a poor design decision.

Most of those PS and BM effects I had to disable just to get the game to run at moderately playable framerates.

Basically, the retail version of Halo looks worse than Q3 engine games and runs horribly.

 

Nuprator, that's your opinion and you obviously have the right to have one. Just as I and others have the right to think that Halo looks cool on the PC and is a good game. As far as I know it has sold a lot of copies as well, staying more than a month on the Top 10 sales list.

And about that Halo video - while it used many assets that ended up in the final game with some reworking, the engine was absolutely not the same. The render of Halo was completely rewritten from the ground up for the Xbox; from an OpenGL engine to a D3D based engine, with many effects that were only made possible by the architecture of the Xbox. To replicate these on a PC required another rewrite, and some of the implementations are very different in this engine - and their performance cost is different, too.

 

Let me clear one thing up here: I'm not trying to troll. But the idea that the performance/graphics ratio of Halo is anything but lousy kind of baffles me. If I have to struggle to get playable framerates on my computer, it makes me wonder just how anyone with a lower end system can play it at all.

Hey, the Sims has a permanent spot on the 10 lists. Doesn't mean much of anything in this discussion.

That's an excuse for the poor performance. Which, in turn, means that you're aware of how poorly the game performs. And frankly, there's no acceptable excuse for a retail game to run like Halo does. Even if they have a good reason for it, it shouldn't come out the door until it can run acceptably well on a wide array of systems. DX:IW was primarily trashed for it's poor performance. At least it has the excuse of being a pretty good looking game.

Basically, if you're ignoring everything else I say, just sort of acknowledge this: They should have done everything in their power to make the game run much better than it currently does. For my computer (9700 Pro, 1gb XMS2700, P4 2.4ghz) to run a port of a 2 year old game at sub-30fps with many of the effects turned off is really not acceptable.

Look at the port of Legacy of Kain - Defiance, for example: It doesn't have any fancy bells and whistles: No Pixel Shading, no bump mapping... nada. Yet it still manages to look much better (which, of course is a subjective statement... but not one easily refuted) and run at 1600x1200 at over 100fps for me. So, if you can make the game look just as good and run much better without those effects, why include them?

 

I don't see how anyone can argue with that. Framerate is king. HaloPC IS B A D.
Case rested.

 

I have to agree with Laa-Yosh. The Xbox hardware is not a GF4 with a P3. XGPU has some pixel shader features that are more like a DX9 card than a GF4. It doesn't follow the same specifications as our PC level cards do.

As such, the effects in the game were built around different restrictions that seems to really hurt cards with <DX9 capability. And, since it is so pixel shader dependent, the resolution has a massive affect on performance scaling because higher resolutions just multiply the shader load. With this in mind I can understand why my 9700 Pro has a rough time at max detail, 1280 res. I can also understand why my laptop's 9200 has even more trouble and lacks the features that are only possible on a DX9 card (mirrored bumped surfaces like cloaking and lakes for instance)

I've read that NV, MS, and ATI all had a hand in optimizing the rendering code. Gearbox really wanted the game to run well. Ripping it apart because you are expecting too much is pretty cruel. Halo really works a lot differently than other games out there. Comparing it to Q3 and Unreal engined games is ridiculous as the engines are VERY different in what they do and how they do it.

 

Then why not re-write those parts so the game would run and look beatiful on a DX9 card?
Saying that the reason it doesn't run well is that it was originally programmed for a regular computer doesn't sit very well with me when they release the game to run on a regular computer....

I don't think any of us are attacking the fact that you have to turn off more and more features the older/lower spec'ed cards you use, as that is the case with most games.... But rather the fact that they could have spent more time making the game look and run better on a computer....

When you port a game from a conosle to the pc, there should be certain requirements imo.... It shouldn't just be getting the barest minimum to work on the PC, so you'll have a cheap cash-cow, but rather making sure that the gaming experience is equal to (or superior to) the original console version....
When now Halo is getting comments about how it looked and played better on the Xbox, it shows that it's mostly ported to be a cash-cow and not to allow the pc-gamers to take part of the fun the console owners had...


As for it using parts to create pixel shaders that are hard to run on a DX9 level card... Well, then re-code them... When you stand to earn as much as the crew behind Halo does, would it really be that horrible to invest a bit more to give us the visuals we've been expecting?

Well, isn't it usually the case that game engines are compared to eachother? Yes, of course there is differences between them, as they're not all created equal... But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to compare them to eachother...

What do you think the average joe consumer cares about?
How the diff dev's have created alternate engines which has different strengths, or how the game looks when they load it up?

So if you don't think the engine can be compared to the other engines on the market, why do you release it now instead of changing it so it is in a state where it can be compared to the other engines?

That "Gearbox really wanted the game to run well." is nice to hear, but it doesn't instill me with a lot of confidence when looking at the end result...
Because if they wanted it to run well, why didn't they keep it longer in development when porting from the Xbox so they could change all the parts of the code that is now being a problem?

And no, I haven't bought Halo for the PC... I was tempted when I saw it on the Xbox, but when I saw the PC port I found I had plenty of better things to spend money on....

 

Everyone has provided valid reasons as to why Halo PC runs so poorly. I'm not saying they haven't. However, there is no acceptable reason in the world for it to run that way. If hundreds of other game developers can figure out how to optimize their engines, then so can the Halo team. Just because there's a reason for the doggish performance doesn't make it OK.

 

I'm saying that I dont think there is another game on the market right now that has as many pixel shader effects as Halo. If you run the game in fixed function path, it will run extremely fast. There will also be tons of missing effects because all of those are generated with vertex and especially pixel shaders.

IMO, we are seeing what happens when 1st and 2nd gen programmable pipeline cards are being saturated with these new fancy effects. Fillrate used to be the problem, it's not so much anymore unless you want 1600x1200 and FSAA. Pixel shading is a totally different area and we really don't know how to judge the performance impact cuz there just aren't many examples of it out there. I believe Halo is the first. I actually think Halo may be more demanding in this respect than HL2 and Doom 3.

Is it inefficient? Who knows. I doubt it's as bad as you guys are saying. Try playing at 640x480, the same res as the Xbox, and output it to a TV. I bet it'll look basically the same, maybe even a little better. And it sure as hell will be faster. I've beaten the game twice on the Xbox and on the PC, I didn't think it was much different on the PC, just a little harder believe it or not. Most of the differences in visual quality can be likely attributed to the higher clarity, lack of interlacing, and resolution of a monitor.

 

There is no way. DroneZ and Aquanox 2 are also using a heavy amount of Pixel Shading effects, but they are running smoothly in the lower end PC. So Halo's bad performance is really due to the bad programming.

I think that Doom 3 and Half Life 2 are more demanding than even Halo 2, so yeah, you're wrong in this matter.

Pixel Shader in the XBox is located somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3 version, which lies somewhere between the capability of GF3 and GF4. Where did you get that stuff? Anyway, the difference between the two is that you can access frame buffer directly on Xbox, but you can't on PC. All of the effects being in Halo are not that spectacular. A two year old game called DroneZ has the similar amount of Pixel Shading & reflection everywhere, and yet, it runs and looks better than Halo on a mere GF3.

That video that you're talking about looks far far better than the DX7 path that Halo has right now, and it runs far better on GF2GTS that the DX7 path on a DX8 hardware. Isn't it ridiculous? You bet it is. Gearbox hasn't done a pretty good job with Halo PC. All of the effects should be able to be replicated wihtout a problem on a DX8 hardware. And like what you said, they are implemented poorly.

 

I'm so happy to see that everyone here knows so much about programming, Xbox hardware and different DX versions. Or maybe it isn't the case?

You guys should really not give out judgement so fast on the technical side of things, as I believe that you do not have the neccessary knowledge. Yes, you are perfectly OK to judge the graphics, or the gameplay, but both are subjective matters. The programming is a more objective question, but IMHO only sufficiently skilled and experienced game engine programmers are qualified well enough to decide wether the PC version of Halo is programmed poorly or not.

One simple example is about those hard-to-transfer effects. Some of these are possible on the Xbox thanks to the unified memory architecture: it is the CPU that calculates them using the contents of the frame buffer. There is no way to replicate this on a PC as the CPU has no access there to the video card's memory. Thus, Gearbox had to write new code that uses the video card to calculate these effects - which will obvoiusly make the engine run slower, as the video card has even more to do in the PC version.
Then there is the shader functionality - GF3/4s have more in their register combiners than what's exposed under DX8. One again Gearbox had to write new code with alternate solutions to the same problems, in order to get similar results.

The funniest thing for me is the opinion that if Halo runs slow, it must be because Gearbox wrote bad code. Has it ever occured to you that perhaps this is the best you can get out of current hardware? That Bungie has made decisions knowing that their target is 640*480 - and the engine does many things that would eat up performance if the work is quadrupled (by going to 1280 resolution)? You should also prepare that in the future, more and more developers will go for lower resolution and high quality shaders, instead of 1600*1200 with simple texture mapped poligons. Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 are the first, with Doom3 coming up quickly. UT2003 may look nice to you, but it's only painted paper to me with no dynamic lighing and shader effects. Thank you but I already had enough of those.

Oh, and Aquanox doesn't nearly use as complicated shaders as Halo does, so it's a bad example.


All in all, this discussion is quite low quality for Beyond3D in my opinion, with incompetent people trying to push their subjective and baseless opinions as the truth. It would be nice to have a coder more competent than me (being just a 3D artist) to jump in and clear up the false beliefs once and for all...

 

I suppose that you've seen the shader code from both applications?

...As you've stated, many people here are not programmers. However, one thing is for certain with regards to the comparisons between the Xbox hardware and the Radeon 9800/Geforce FX 5900, etc.: current high-end DirectX 9 hardware is much more capable and powerful than that on the Xbox, and many people here are simply wondering why Gearbox could not produce efficient implementations of shaders/post processing effects, etc. utilized in Halo.

As more games that heavily utilize DirectX 8.x-level shaders are released, it will be easier to judge the quality of Gearbox's work on Halo PC. At the moment, however, there are a handful of titles/demos that can be referenced that may support the idea that the Halo PC port could have been done a bit better.