Halo 2 Stutter

Ok so I just installed Halo 2 on my computer. My specs are in the sig. Anyway from what I understand this game shouldn't even stress my computer. I've heard of people getting 100 fps with a less powerful machine. But whenever I start the game excessive load is put on my hard drive and during the first minute of a level I can barely move because the drive is being accessed so much. After a few minutes everything is fine again and the game runs smoothly. But when I finish a level the movie stutters a lot and i can't even follow because of that and the loading times for each movie is really long. What could be causing these problems? Why is my HD being accessed so much?

 

perhaps you have some program defragmenting your drive while you play?

 

No I checked that and all my games run fine so I think it has to do with the game itself. I am however using a no-dvd crack so that I don't have to play with the DVD inserted. Could that be the problem? I've always operated under the assumption that playing off the HD is faster than a CD.

 

Did you go to "Custom Install" or did you go to "Play now" when you started the game? If you hit play now then the game gets streamed off the disk which reduces performance.

 

If you just had a regular DVD reader...It'd go smoothly, why bother going with the no dvd crack thing? ( don't get me wrong, that's just my opinion)

No offense to you on that.

 

YOU DONT EVEN NEED A NO DVD CRACK! The game runs without a DVD JUST FINE! You install it and you never need to use the DVD again I love games that do that.

 

Yeah I just found out that you don't need the crack. The game works without a DVD anyway. And I did do custom install so that the game fully installed before I started playing.

Edit: Btw, the lag seems to be a result of the movies because the lag only comes when the movies start. This happens when going from level to level otherwise there is no lag.

 

The game, logically, does the bulk of it's loading during movies - since they're prerendered, they're less intensive than true real-time gameplay. That you get a lot of hard drive access and related slowdowns seems kind of obvious to me - you're running Vista on 1GB of RAM. I have 2GB, and my GPU doesn't share any of my RAM, and I still get 50-60% RAM usage playing Halo 2. Do the math - with 768MB of RAM available (assuming that 256MB is all being sucked up by your GPU), you're going to be dipping pretty deep into the page file!

 

Lowlymarine, I think you are right. To test this, I ran Halo 2 in windowed mode with task manager running in another window. I found that Halo 2 was using around 98% of the physical memory but I don't think that my GPU is borrowing any RAM because it only borrows RAM if there is some to spare. I can't believe that Halo 2 uses that much memory though. In the task manager it was using more than 500mb!! But all this memory usage is just when loading movies.