8600GT and Halo 2

I'm in the market to purchase a new laptop and am thoroughly considering the new Dell Inspiron 1520 with the NVIDIA 8600GT. I was wondering if this card can play Halo 2 at highest settings, or at least be able to look as good as the Xbox version, if not better. Thanks in advance.

 

Doubt it since Halo 2 is ported from xbox to pc hence it won't be optimized for pc and will run sub-par.

 

I doubt your answer, as I've heard many a story where people have had great FPS with mid range systems. I just want to get some good background from others who have played this on PC.

 

I know Halo 1 will work pretty well on that.
But I don't have Vista, so I don't know about Halo 2.

 

Should run fine. It will probably not look as smooth and fluid as the 360, but it should still be enjoyable.

 

from all accounts Halo2 hasnt been optimised very well for PC- you need a fairly powerful system to run the game smoothly- especially considering that the graphics are 3yrs old. running it on a laptop even with a good card like a 8600GT might be so great.

 

Halo 2's adaptation might not be the best thing to get excited about when it comes to the 8600GT. It will play a lot of games smoothly but I would keep Halo 2 in another category "If it runs smooth great, if not - next title"

 

I have a an 8600m GT card as well, and I play Halo 2, I usually play at medium. The 8600m GT can play at the highest setting, it's just that you'll get low performance on gameplay.

 

if the game was optimised properly there wouldnt be a problem- damn developers!

 

Halo 2 is a pile of ****. It runs like crap, almost unplayable, on lowest settings on my Go7400 when I can run stuff like FEAR and Battlefield 2 on medium easily. As if that wasn't bad enough, even on the highest settings Halo 2 is an ugly, ugly game that was at its prime years ago.

 

It's not ugly at all, are you kidding me? It's a really nice game on my desktop with dual 8800 GTXs.

 

Yea, I forgot that EVERYONE has SLI 8800 GTXs...lol

 

Sorry about that. My bad

 

I gotta agree here. I don't think there's any reason the 8600M GT in my Asus G1s shouldn't manage to play Halo 2 on high details, so that's what I stubbornly do. It's at least as pretty as the first Halo, but I've found regardless of the settings I've used I notice there is a slight pause between, say, moving the mouse and the view changing. It's not enough to worry about most of the time during gameplay, IMO, but compared with the response on my system of F.E.A.R and Doom 3 (which I play on very high settings) it is noticeably a little slower.

 

I have an 8800 as well, it runs at 1680x1050 on my machine with all options on full and AA - it still looks like crap. In fact, pretty much every single review of the game points out how dated it looks.

and also, you really don't need to point out you have 8800gtx sli in half the posts you make....this is about the 5th time I've heard you say that!

 

Third time actually... , and I'm not posting anymore about 8800 GTX SLI if it's not necessary. So no more arguments, k?

 

Halo 2 is worst ever port to pc. They did not even bother to increase the texture resolution. No matter what settings or resolution I run it at, I can get plenty of FPS but what the point when the game arrives 3 years late and has graphics that look like UT2004. At least they could worked on the texture and bump and pixel shading a bit more to deliver maybe a Fry Cry quality graphics ...but nooo.
The lazy slave developers at MS studio thought oh what the f**k people will buy anything with the name Halo even it we put sh*t inside the box... they will buy it and fan boys will make sure no one say one bad thing about it...
To make matter worse the market dept at M$ get a idea of using the Halo name to try to sell some copies of Vista. People who buy Vista to run Halo... most likely won't like Halo and return it but return their Vista would be troublesome so they will keep it.

Sorry about my Rant... Just tried of people saying good things about Halo 2 PC which is piece of crap.

 

actually they did increase the texture resolution- gamespot.com did a whole article about all the improvements they made to the PC version- basically they increased the resolution a bit, added a bit of lighting & shadowing & thats about it- still pretty much standard 2004 graphics- & man it surprising how old the game looks- i remember playing Halo2 a lot & i thot it looked good- but it does look old- especially if u look at fuzzy low res shots of the xbox version.

 

Well....Halo 2's graphics are old news and while they are fluid on the xbox, and it's still a lot of fun to play, I wouldn't even think of buyin the port for PC. The graphics yell out "I look older than I really am, which is more than 3 years old"

If you compare Halo 3, even, to Haze....Haze destroys it graphically. Hopefully, it will in gameplay as well....we will see.

About the 8600M GT and Halo 2, there's no chance you can go on high settings and play comfortably. It would just be too slow.

 

Worst ever port? You've not played many ports have you mWMA?

 

I would also agree its one of the worse ports ever as well. How could it not be? It runs worse on my laptop and desktop then either Oblivion or Rainbow Six Vegas, which both look infinitely better and are also thought of as poor ports - what other examples of worse ports in recent times could you name?

 

Halo 2 runs like a dream compared to the newest "games for windows" port.

Shadowrun. It demands nearly 2x more system power than Halo 2. To me it looks even worse. It runs like crap on the lowest setings on my desktop!!! (halo 2 runs great at the highest)

Poor coding to the max, plus the game itself is horrible, no single player, and you have to pay for a xbox gold account to play any games (there are pc only decicated servers that you dont have to pay for, but usually only 1 -3 of them and they are full or you cant connect so in essense you are forced to pay to play the game)


check out the recomended requriements from MS's page on Halo 2

RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS
OS: Windows Vista™
Processor: 2 Ghz Pentium 4 class processor (or x64)
RAM: 1 GB
Hard Drive: 7 GB
Video Card: NVIDIA 6100, ATI X700, or above
Online Multi-player: Internet connection for Games for Windows – LIVE
Drive: DVD-ROM drive


thats not that bad, and it does run great on my computer.

But now check out Shadowrun...

RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS
OS: Windows Vista
Processor: Dual Core CPU
RAM: 2GB RAM
Hard Drive: 4.5 GB
Video Card: NVIDIA 7800
ATI X1800 (256MB or above)
Online Multi-player: Broadband Internet Connection, Games for Windows -- LIVE Gold Subscription for Cross-platform gameplay.


You pretty much need a dual core cpu, and a 7800gtx to play... (I have a 7800GTX and it runs horrible becuase I dont have a dual core cpu and they fubared single core coding)

 

i don't suggest you get halo 2 on the pc not only for the steep requirements for such a crappy port, but because of its poor performance.

from the few minutes i played online at a friend's house, it was clearly evident bungie, or whatever hired gun bungie chose to port the title over, decided to allow users with a 360 controller take advantage of the same auto-aim console gamers are used to; in contrast, gamers using a mouse and keyboard are given minimal auto-aim, which results in a very annoying online experience.

if you're a fan of halo, i suggest u spring for a 360 and snag halo 2 for the console, where it belongs. if it's too pricey, i'm sure you can find a used xbox for cheap on ebay to play halo 2.

but seriously, microsoft could not have picked a better game to show off vista...such steep requirements for a 3 year old game...utterly ridiculous.

 

Those are not recommeneded requirements, those are minimum, and they're bull**** too. For some reason the official site has the same for minimum and recommended, so I assume that's where you got it from.

Minimum - 6100 or X700 - what kind of **** is that? The x700 is about 3 times more powerful then the 6100 so how can they both be the absolute minimum?!

I have a Go7400 which is also vastly more powerful then the 6100 and on SP Halo 2 I can barely get 20-30fps on the lowest settings and resolution. It's not a problem with my machine, because I can run other games fine. I would LOVE to see someone with a 6100 running the game.

From GamePros review:

 

Id never even try to play a game at minumum.

Halo 2 runs perfect on my 2 yr old desktop.

Just shadowrun is almost unplayalbe, esp online.

all my specs meet recomended too except dual core cpu.. so it hs to be the coding.

I bet its not a single core/ dual core game. its only dual core and its forcing my opteron to run 2 seperate threads and its causing issues.

 

Playing Halo 2 VS FEAR Combat on my older machine: P4 3.2Ghz, X1800XT, 2GB of Ram.

FEAR Combat looks about 3x better, and runs at about 160% of the framerate. The same can be said of Half Life 2, Battlefield 2, the list goes on, they all look far better and perform far better then Halo 2. Really, there is utterly no excuse at all for Halo 2 outrageous hardware demands, it's what I'd call a pinnacle of crap coding and I'm surprised MS let this mess out and on the already dodgy ground of Vista Only to boot. I can't play the game online because I only have XP, I can only play SP, maybe if I could then I'd actually bother to play it more....It's ok for me because I have 2 relatively decent desktop but not everyone does, and plenty of people probably bought the game in good faith based on the minimum stated requirements - which should mean the game is at least playable smoothly on lowest settings. Which it totally isn't, and isn't actually totally smooth unless you have way higher then the minimum requirements.

I'm not ranting at you, just at MS and whoever it was that ported this game, it's an absolute disgrace, mind you I've not played Shadowrun at all but yes I have heard its equally as botched, it's this kind of rubbish that will convince people to migrate to console gaming to avoid all this crap. Hardly does wonders for Vista either, it's two exclusive games in a state like this.

 

Well, thanks for all the feedback. When I get my new laptop, I think I'm going to stick with the first Halo, at least that was playable and enjoyable. I would get a 360, but it's still way too faulty, and I have a Wii which satisfies my console gaming needs.

 

Star Trek Legacy, GRAW, RE4.

 

hah. graw is laughably terrible i agree. thank god for the battlefields, the hl2's, the quake 4's, that validate the pc as a great gaming platform.

 

/bac 2 topic

halo 2 was origionally made for the 1st xbox. A recent study ( http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/best-gra...ndering-looks-better-than-xbox-360-268357.php) has shown that the 8700gt is more powerful than the 360. Therefore i have to come to the conclusion that the 8600gt would be more than adequate to handel halo2 pc. And to add the the question of optimiztion: the PC version of Halo 2 took about 2 1/2 years to come out after the xbox version. In that time im guessing they optomized it (and telling by the time it took them) they did it to perfection.

Yes, the 8600gt can handle halo 2 pc very nicely and it may even look better than it appears on xbox.

 

Your saying Halo 2 is optimized to perfection? Every single review of the game states what a resource hog it is and how remarkably bland, and dated it looks, if not downright ugly for a game warranting those kind of spec's.

Sure it looks better then the Xbox version, but lets not forgot that the Xbox is well over 5 years old, so that's not saying much at all.

Playing the first few levels of Halo 2 even on maximum settings feels like you've taken a major step back in time.

 

yes halo 2 looks better than the xbox version due to AA if you turn it on, however assuming becasue it took 2 years to come out = optimised is far from the truth. Its not nearly as bad as say shadowrun, but its deifnitly not programed as well as a dedicated pc title, but even thats not saying much as programers these days seem to take advantage of our super strong hardware like 750w psus, 8800gtx's, and dual core cpus and just assume sloppy coding is ok because we can pick it up with the bill for better hardware.


If you look at games visuals in the past that ran smooth with nearly nothing for a system, and now you have games taking 10x more power to render, the visuals definitly didnt multipy by the same 10x.

 

With a 8600GT you can play it at high settings. Why are people doubting this? PC does have the better graphics comparing them to the 360. But its nothing to argue or worry about, they are similar. I own the vista version and know someone with the 360 version. 8600GT is a great card! As long as your other hardware matches the power of your GPU then you won't have a problem.

 

Resident Evil 4 PC port is the worst port ever...IMO

 

Definitely not. Anyone who's played an Atari Xbox to PC port will agree they are the worst. Enter the Matrix and Path of Neo anyone?? But I digress

 

Ive an Acer 5920G with the default Nvidia drivers, and there is heavy texture flickering on certain surfaces such as MAsterChief, some control panels, alien ships etc....

It runs pretty poorly. Slow, and the mouse turning is even worse than Halo 1. Like going through treacle. Turn up the sensitivity too much, and it results in a choppy mouse.

Finally, the game does not detect or run at widescreen resolution. In full screen mode, I only have the option of 800x600 or 1024x768. In windowed mode, I get more options, but only 1280x720, instead of the 1280x800 I want.

It has been poorly trnaslated to the PC. I will try the latest graphics drivers for this card and report back.

EDIT: Installed modded nvidia drivers and all the issues above have disappeared, apart from no support for my native resolution 1280x800. I am only given the option of 1280x720, which works fine anyway.

 

Hmm... let's see. There's ten different people posting about their experiences and how pretty much nothing short of 8800 GTX in SLi can play this, and there's two people saying "the 8600GT is a good card. it can play the game."

I'd go with the ten.

 

Path of Neo was a pretty good port, but that's just my opinion.