HALO : tweaks

[TrinireturnofGamez]

Simple tweaks that can greatly increase your perf without much image Q loss .

 Specular : you can get as much as 40% performance increase with this OFF , you won't miss the shiny metal when you see how fast the game moves  
 Shadows : who cares if you can see shadows? big perf gain here

  Shaders : Optimise the game for your graphics  card by doing the following :
Go into halo shorcut and add -usexx to the end of the file's location . Find out what vcard you have and optimise the shaders for the following :
Geforce FX 5200-5800 : set shaders to "use14" or "use11" for increased performance . This decreases the quaility of water effects [ if you have a pixel shader card] and the detail of bump mapping/mip mapping .
Radeon 8500-9200 : set shaders to "use14"  , radeon cards are proven to be nearly 2x faster for halo .
Geforce 3-4 : set shaders to "use11" for geforce 3 and "use14" for geforce 4's , if performance is not enough for the 4s decrease it to "use11"


Get CAT 3.9 and Forceware , big perf increases in these two and halo doesn't crash anymore with 3.9                    

[vinion2000]

the only downside is when you use these optimizations the game goes from DOOM3 quality to quake 3 ( or even 2 if your card sucks ). who ever told you that there wouldnt be much quality loss lied. there is a huge gap between Halo normal and Halo optimal. some setting changes dont even make a difference on certain cards. on my system turning specular on and off made no real difference once i kept the resolution at 800 x 600. in fact turning off anti-aliasing from the control panel is about the fastest modification ive seen and many of my other friends have confirmed this. ofcourse when you turn off AA youll see the huge quality leap. walls where you could have seen every crack and scratch just become textured quake 2 quality walls. things get more blurry and you havent even adjusted the pixel shader which makes matters even worse. we ran halo on a 2.4ghz pc with a onboard intel 82845G/GL and the game ran ok but it looked like it was software rendered aka horrible. unless you have a video card with raw power halo is going to jitter. once you accept that you can have the game looking reasonable but at decent frame rates.                    

[androsovic]

thanx there boy trini,i go check that out but my halo running tweet                    

[TrinireturnofGamez]

my PC can't take HAlo's advanced physics... stickin at every explosion . Other than da de radeon runs smooth . AA on, it actually WORKED with AA on?                    

[vinion2000]

well my pc is a semi beast (see the thread on system for my pc specs). i am able to run almost everything at full at 800 x 600 with AA on. yet like you it will slow down at the explosions and stuff but was still a bit jittery. it wasnt till i took it off that i noticed a difference.

halo needs alot of power and proves how bad programming is. the demo is a frabricated lie. alot of ppl play the demo and think its going to be alot like that but actually the demo isnt using anything near to what the actual game is using.  halo remind me of GTA3 heres a little story

when first moved up here i had a 800mhz with a 32mb tnt riva ran slower than s**t
after installing a pci gf2 it ran a little faster but was too chopping to play
flash foward to my 2.4ghz 533 p4, gf4 ti2400, 512mb 433 ddrram and you know what it still jitters like s**t.
this is a bad game poorly optimised from the pcs used to compile it. on a brighter note GTA3 vice city plays perfect. microsoft should have known better and i had such high hopes after dungeon siege. Halo is a good game though one of the few games i play from start to finish and i eh even finish hitman2 since i came out. yet the price for visual appreciantion too high.                    

[TrinireturnofGamez]

i found the problem.
My friend has a Geforce 2 PINE which disables bump mapping by default , he says that it runs smooth but everything IS smooth. Then i realized, after looking at everything closely, that halo is one huge BUMP MAP . The grass is actually green with bump mapped leaves , the scars are bump mapped, the lines all around are bump mapping, the faces and bodies are actually quite flat with bump mapping.
   We have to remember HALO was originally built for the TNT2 level of PCs in 2000, when they ported it to the box they bump mapped everything in order to hide the low polygon count. HALO tries to use a very hvy bump mapping scheme which only the latest DX9 graphics cards can handle.
 Get a tweaking tool and turn off bump mapping and it will move better, it will look like half life but move smooooth.                    

[androsovic]

pine is a very weak brand.i used to big them up but then my eyes were opened                    

[coledraft]

What type of video card you have in you computer andro