Halo for PC

Imran Siddiqui · October 3, 2003, 05:11

Just picked it up. Great fun to play this with a mouse and keyboard with higher resolutions as well (well, if you didn't have a HDTV anyway

). I'm having a blast playing it.

Haha, Bill thought he could get me to get an X-Box because of keeping games like this off PCs for a year or so, but I'm patient, I wait (while playing it at friends' houses

).

Any of the rest of you picked this up?

Zealot · October 3, 2003, 05:46

Not yet, and while I did hear it has great graphics, it has been terribly ported, with constant drops in frames per second, many below 30 fps even in top-notch hardware specs.

Do us a favour:
Go to http://www.fraps.com and run the program before playing Halo. Then tell us how often it drops below 30 fps with your PC specs.
The game doesn't support Anti Aliasing, so don't bother checking its performance with it...

Don't know about Anisotropic Filtering, so go ahead and try it please.

Thanks!

Imran Siddiqui · October 3, 2003, 05:50

I'll do it when I play tomorrow

. Sleepy time now

.

Verto · October 3, 2003, 08:24

Hadn't even heard it had come out yet, thanks for the heads up.

DrSpike · October 3, 2003, 14:13

I'll probably pick this up as soon as I get around to doing my upgrade.

Imran Siddiqui · October 3, 2003, 15:45

It actually just came out. It was still in the boxes (not on the shelf) when I went to the Game store

.

Paul Hanson · October 3, 2003, 17:23

Downloaded a couple of days ago (oops, shouldn't have said that really), and I'm loving it. My graphics card isn't really up to the really fancy stuff (GeForce4 MX), so I can't have things like shadows and specular lighting, and I can only play it in 800x600 before it gets a bit sluggish, but it's still fantastic.

Zealot · October 3, 2003, 18:13

Quote:

Originally posted by Paul Hanson
Downloaded a couple of days ago (oops, shouldn't have said that really), and I'm loving it. My graphics card isn't really up to the really fancy stuff (GeForce4 MX), so I can't have things like shadows and specular lighting, and I can only play it in 800x600 before it gets a bit sluggish, but it's still fantastic.

Try it with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro/XT. Now THAT's a video card!

General Ludd · October 3, 2003, 18:22

Quote:

Originally posted by Zealot

Try it with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro/XT. Now THAT's a video card!

Have you tried it on said card? I have a 9700 Pro and look forward to testing it out on Halo.

Zealot · October 3, 2003, 18:29

Quote:

Originally posted by Osweld

Have you tried it on said card? I have a 9700 Pro and look forward to testing it out on Halo.

No, and of course yours' better. But little more, and much more expensive.
Good buy though, IMO.

Asher · October 3, 2003, 18:32

Quote:

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Haha, Bill thought he could get me to get an X-Box because of keeping games like this off PCs for a year or so, but I'm patient, I wait (while playing it at friends' houses

).

If you think about it, it was (and still is) a brilliant business decision.

Bungie had as part of their purchase agreement a guarantee that Halo would be allowed to come out on PC. So it had to at some point.

MS waited until they began giving Halo away for free with Xboxes before it came out on PC, and just in time to get a whole bunch of PC users hooked on Halo 1 because Halo 2 comes out on Xbox, and will never be out on PC, early next year -- and it looks way better.

Asher · October 3, 2003, 18:34

Quote:

Originally posted by Zealot
No, and of course yours' better. But little more, and much more expensive.
Good buy though, IMO.

/me will try it on his Radeon 9800 Pro overclocked to 486MHz core (Pro is 380MHz, XT is 412MHz).

Now that is a video card.

Asher · October 3, 2003, 18:37

For the record, here are the Halo benchmarks: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1890&p=9

It's amazing that the Xbox, with a 733MHz Pentium III and a GeForce 4, gets such great framerates -- this was at a time when no one had programmed for the GeForce 4 yet and the Xbox was in a beta state, too.

Shows you just how much more efficient console hardware is.

Zealot · October 3, 2003, 18:41

Quote:

Originally posted by Asher

* Asher will try it on his Radeon 9800 Pro overclocked to 486MHz core (Pro is 380MHz, XT is 412MHz).

Now that is a video card.

Congrats on the Overclock, if you have it truly stable you have there a great video card! Hercules?

Asher · October 3, 2003, 19:23

It's an ATI, but I took off the stock cooling and replaced it with a Zalman heatpipe with fan.

Imran Siddiqui · October 4, 2003, 05:26

I didn't install the Frame rate counter, but it seems to go very smoothly. Decent story as well (but nothing too special).

However, I'm getting annoyed at the game. The graphics are great, and the AI is pretty good, and it ain't too hard or easy, but DAMN, couldn't Bungie hire some decent level designers? The worst part of this game is the endlessly same-ish levels. It gets to the point where you are saying 'When will this damn level ****ing end!', which isn't something you want to say.

Quote:

just in time to get a whole bunch of PC users hooked on Halo 1 because Halo 2 comes out on Xbox, and will never be out on PC, early next year -- and it looks way better.

Guess like I'll never play Halo 2 then, unless one of my friends down here gets an XBox and the game.

Of course the decision is made easier by the poor level design. On first glace, it's a great FPS, as you play it just becomes Above Average.

I have a feeling that Half Life 2 is going to totally blow Halo 2 out of the water if we have the same programmers on that one (though I still have to see if Half Life 2 can beat NOLF2).

Asher · October 4, 2003, 15:27

The level design was subpar due to time constraints -- Halo was supposed to have 30 levels, it ended up with 10 and much of them are just copy/pasted to make them larger.

Halo itself was totally scratched and rewritten in 10 months to meet the Xbox launch date, so the levels were one of the most time consuming things to do and they simply ran out of time.

Halo 2, they've had years for, so it'll be amazing.

Quote:

I have a feeling that Half Life 2 is going to totally blow Halo 2 out of the water if we have the same programmers on that one (though I still have to see if Half Life 2 can beat NOLF2).

It'll be interesting, both look to be amazing games.
I still think Halo 2 will vastly outsell Half-Life 2 though (both are coming out on Xbox).

Nostromo · October 4, 2003, 15:43

I'm surprised they can even do Half-Life 2 on the Xbox.

Asher · October 4, 2003, 16:52

You can do incredible things with the hardware when you can "write to the metal".

Look at Halo 2, Rallisport Challenge 2, etc. Simply amazing.

They look better than 99% of the PC games do on Radeon 9800 Pros, with a fraction of the memory and computing power.

Hooray for efficiency and consistent hardware!

Sarxis · October 4, 2003, 17:53

640x480 always looks amazing.

Asher · October 4, 2003, 18:06

It looks surprisingly good on the TV, because it was designed to fit in that resolution.

Nostromo · October 4, 2003, 20:46

Quote:

Originally posted by Asher

Look at Halo 2, Rallisport Challenge 2, etc. Simply amazing.

They look better than 99% of the PC games do on Radeon 9800 Pros, with a fraction of the memory and computing power.

I haven't seen any in-game footage. I heard Halo 2 looks amazing. I just hope you're right.

BustaMike · October 4, 2003, 21:31

Halo 2 looks sweet, but Half Life 2 looks even better. I need Rallisport Challenge 2 to come out. I destroyed the first one completely and I need new challenges and multiplayer

.

General Ludd · October 4, 2003, 21:44

Halo is an alright game, about as good as Half-Life in singleplayer regards from what I've seen so far. But the multiplayer sucks crap. Maybe it'll get interesting after mods are made, but untill then...