Halo received feedback from our fellow gamers who pointed out that its lackluster performance can be attributed to porting the game from the Xbox to the PC. While that may be true to some extent, we should give credit to Gearbox Software for providing a conversion that manages to retain much of the gaming experience from the Xbox. By porting Halo to the PC, Gearbox also incorporated higher resolution graphics, advanced shader effects, and 3D positional audio.
Halo's single-player campaign has been one of the few games that I have recently played and was due in part by a desire to compare it to the Xbox version. However, Halo does provide a compelling storyline, which increases the entertainment value and keeps the player interested. For the most part, I found performance in Halo acceptable at a resolution of 1024x768 with maximum graphics settings and pixel shader 2.0 effects enabled. There were times that I cursed the slow performance, although I should feel fortunate since I have experienced the "wrath of Halo" on less capable hardware.
Halo
Halo performance was determined by running the built-in timedemo with the pixel shader 2.0 rendering path. Texture quality was set to high, specular lights, shadows, and decals were enabled, and particles and sound were disabled.
Benchmarks were run at resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 with No AA and No AF enabled.
Halo: Combat Evolved Performance
And with 8X AF enabled.
Halo: Combat Evolved Performance
UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2003
Benchmarking Unreal Tournament 2003 spread like wildfire in graphics card reviews and supplanted Quake 3 as the premier first-person shooter benchmark. As expected, Individual Hardware Vendors (IHV) such as ATI and NVIDIA were quick to react, which lead to a series of driver optimizations that were aimed at increasing the performance of their graphics chipsets. Web sites eventually reported that NVIDIA's optimizations included a form of texture filtering that the community dubbed as "brilinear filtering".
These types of optimizations played havoc on graphics card reviewers as it became necessary to begin examining image quality in detail. This examination became even more important if product comparisons were being made.
Unreal Tournament 2003 - DM-Icetomb
Performance in Unreal Tournament 2003 was measured by playing back Tim "TheBaron" Murray's custom demo of a match against 5 bots that takes place on the bonus pack DM-Icetomb map. The demo contains 7635 frames. The default MaxDetail.ini and MaxDetailUser.ini files were used and sound was disabled.
Benchmarks were run at resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x960, and 1600x1200 with 4X AA and 8X AF enabled. Note that trilinear optimizations were enabled on the GeForce 6800 Ultra. The average frame rate was obtained from Unreal Tournament 2003 while the minimum frame rate was obtained from FRAPS.
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