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

and it does. i have a freind who bought my old geforce3 from me and ran halo with it on his old 800mhz p3. with that system at 640x480 halo ran almost identical to how it runs on my xbox.

 

Even if that were true, then it was a poor decision to include them, since they do little in terms of increasing the overall graphical quality and do lots in terms of slowing the game down.

Also, I just looked at that link on Gearbox's forums:

If they can tweak the engine to get up to a 60% performance incease, then why on earth did they release it in its current state? They're basically saying "Hey, we released it unoptimized and plan to release a patch to fix the performance a few months down the line."

 

Good point. If there is really a way to make it run 60 % faster without sacrificing any graphical defintion, it also means that its poor performance is not justified because it's so "damn fu*cking demanding". And for Bohdy, you might be right, in the sense, that every console has its own unique special feature, that might be able to be reproduced perfectly in others, but if it keeps done in the exactly same way, will cost a lost of performance (remember MGS2's stuttering in the XBox version, while the PS2 version of SOns of Liberty runs smoothly). Had they spent more time in optimization (not just "replication" as you said) , I think that GF3 will be able to handle this game to run and look at least as good as the XBox version.

 

like i said, it runs decent on a geforce3 now and i imagine gearbox tested that and desided to call it good there. the sad part is that my 9800xt doesn't do a whole lot better than the geforce3 in halo. but the game was finished with respect to the xbox and not computers and i doubt gearbox had any intention of rewriteing the shader engine, just porting it over.

 

You mean, ~ 30 fps at 640 * 480 resolution decent? Are you using high, low or medium settings?

 

ya all settings on high, and ya ~30fps. it dips lower in spots, but no worse than it does on the xbox. also i should add that he upgraded the 800mhz p3 to a 1700+ and it still runs about the same, so the game is heavly gpu bound.

 

Here is the quote (there may be more information in the referenced thread, but I am not going to go through the whole thing) that banksie is referring to:

As many people guessed, Halo PC is not GPU bound...

 

Well, I've run it on P4 3Ghz C systems, and it runs like crap. Obviously the game was developed on a super computer.

 

yup that's what I've said from the beginning. Gearbox is a bunch of liars.
Their storied has changed too many times.

 

i'm sorry, i should have been more clear above. when i said gpu bound i was reffering to the case of the geforce3 in paticular.

 

Yeah, I knew it all along... My first reaction when I played it was that they were running all the vertex processing throught the CPU or something.

 

I have a 9700 Pro, 1gb XMS2700 DDR, 2.4b ghz P4... at 1024x768, with all of the effects turned off, my framerate still drops to 10fps during some indoor fights. That's completely unacceptable, in my opinion.

 

but it's not really a fair comparison, because some effects are excluded from the dx8 path that were in the xbox version. so basicly, it may run similar at a similar resolution, but it doesn't look as good.

c:

 

it's a pretty fair comparison considering that those dx9 only effects are not even a part of about 95% of the game.

 

I'd just like to point out some things:

If this 'fast shader engine' is replacing a slow bit of directx as they say, then its not so much a matter of Gearbox doing crap coding but Micro$haft.
Remember, Halo is a Micro$haft game, so Gearbox probably had no option but to use that directx effects layer.

That they are going to do the replacement in a patch is a strong indication of anti-lazyness on the part of Gearbox & a short timeframe for the conversion.

User maps I hope to be forthcoming with the (forgotten the TLA, something like Halo Modification Kit) kit thingie that is referenced by the developers.

WTF are some of you on about with the concept that extensively using shaders is a dumb idea???
Really, WTF.
Shaders = the future of games.
Simple textured polygons = the old days.

Given that xbox has some advantages in hardware/architecture over the more flexible, varied & backwards compatible PCs, I'd say that 30fps @ 640 * 480 on a gf3 via this slow layer of DirectX, is doing quite well indeed since 30fps @ 640 * 480 is what the xbox was doing.

Summarily, I think the main focus for anger should be on Micro$haft for:
a) buying bungie
b) forcing them to make Halo an xbox game
c) doing so at the expense of the PC/Mac versions
d) waiting so long before even starting to negotiate to have a port made
e) thus forcing a short development timeframe on Gearbox to actually do the port
f) writing a crappy bloatware layer in directx & forcing Gearbox to use it
g) forcing Gearbox to have issues with QA testing because everything has go through Redmond, where they have issues getting enough testing done

 

Link To Halo Messageboard

Translation: "Bitch to Microsoft - they are holding up all our cool patches".

(Warning: Ridiculous number of big image sigs on that link)

 

"Halo" is a bad port to the PC. I like to try out alot of game demos to see how they run on my PC. Halo is the ONLY game so far that I haven't been able to run at 1600x1200 at the default settings.


AthlonXP 2000+
FIC AU11 Nforce2
512mb DDR2100 2.2.2.5 (Kingston Vale Ram)
Asylum Ti4200 128mb
WD 80GB 7200rpm 8mb

 

I haven't read through the whole thread but some of the comments look way too much to me. I recently finished Halo and IMO it was one of the best single-player experiences ever. My machine specs are: P4 oced @ 3.3 Ghz (237 mhz fsb) and Geforce FX5900 Ultra. With all the effects activated i have to say i was noticing some jerkiness during firefights so what i did was to head over some faqs on the net and voila ! Most claimed that the specular highlight setting was causing the framerate problems and although i initially found that hard to believe it turned out to be true. With the specular setting to off i enjoyed silky-smooth gameplay on every map under all circumstances. And i strongly disagree with some of you saying that Halo looks crap. IMO the bump-mapping and the PS2 effects were awesome and despite the models being low-poly i enjoyed the game's looks a lot. In fact i can't think of many other games that actually look a lot better.

edit: and please don't start any "you are not sensitive to fps" crap, because i have been gaming competitively online since Q/Q2 early 98, so i have some clue about how poor fps can hinder the gameplay. But in single player it matters less...