good fix to make Halo really playable and higher resolution

[JediKnight]

I saw this in a forum. Find your Halo .exe and add the line ( -useff ) at the end of it. No more stuttering, and its really playable, even going higher than 1024x768. Some visuals are missing but its well worth it. Good luck.

[Nephilim]

uhh...okay, but what does -useff do?

[oldsk00l]

That's fixed function. I dunno, I heard about it but figured it was just going to make it horribly ugly.

I guess I'll try it though.

[The Baron]

oh, you know, use fixed function shading. like sub-PS1.1 shading.

in other words, do this if you want to basically shoot the image quality in the face.

[saturnotaku]

Don't like using fixed function. However, the FSAA fix by editing the config file gave me a huge performance increase even with FSAA enabled. Without it, the game was barely playable at 1024x768, no AA and 8xAF. After editing the config file, it's smooth at the same resolution with 2xAA and 8xAF.

[JediKnight]

hey saturn, how do you do that? maybe its better than the -useff I found. Its very playable but eye candy is down alot with it.

[saturnotaku]

Check this (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18078&perpage=20&pagenumber=5) thread. All the info you need is there. Just remember, every time there is a patch released for this game, it will rebuild your config file. You would be wise to edit it, then copy it to a safe location so you can quickly fix it again.

[Edge]

It's pretty pointless to run the game with the -useff swich. Why would you want to greatly degrade the visual quality so that you can run it in higher resolutions? Doesn't that defeat the purpose:confused: :confused: :confused:

Not to mention it would basicly run the game in GF2 mode. Yes, lets turn our $500 video cards into a GF2! And a lot of effects look REALLY crappy with it, the inside ship areas and water effects are practicly made of flat-shaded polygons. It looks like a game from 1995 or something.

But what does that Break Entities or whatever it's called function do? Why does it make AA work, and the game in general run faster? If it offers "free" performence with no quality loss they presumably would've just had it always be enabled.

[Gargr]

Originally posted by Edge
But what does that Break Entities or whatever it's called function do? Why does it make AA work, and the game in general run faster? If it offers "free" performence with no quality loss they presumably would've just had it always be enabled.

I dont know but it makes the water look like flat-shaded polygons

[JediKnight]

Its not to degrade visual quality, run at high resolution( I play this at 1024x768), or even turn them into GeForce2 cards, its that the damn year old game runs like crap on my GeForce FX 5900 ULtra. A scene with small action going on and it sputters like its a damn TNT2 card. WHat they shouldve done is instead of just porting the game over, they shouldve cared and really CREATE a version for the PC. Anyway, thanks Saturn, your tweaks are better and Im using those instead of -useff. At least now the game looks better AND dosent sputter when Im having a little action.

[RoachMojo]

Can anyone confirm that AF actually works with Halo? I have been using 4xAF and I fully see a difference, and a framerate hit, but I have seen recent vcard reviews that claim it does not work. Can anyone else confirm this?

I do know that AA does not work.

[JonathanM]

Here's the info about AA and AF in Halo that is posted at ExtremeTech (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1354064,00.asp)

It should be noted that neither anti-aliasing nor anisotropic filtering have any affect on the way Halo looks. Enabling these features will only slow things down a lot. This is because several of the game's cooler effects — such as the Predator-like active camouflage and the blurred zoom-in effect for the sniper rifle — rely on using render targets and post-processing. The entire scene is rendered to an intermediate buffer (an off-screen Direct3D surface) instead of the video card's back buffer, and then the filter effect is applied before the final frame is copied to the back buffer and projected on your monitor.

According to Shawn Green, Gearbox's lead rendering engineer, it would be possible to use in-game menus to force the game to draw anti-aliased or aniso-filtered frames to that intermediate buffer, but none of the video cards support AA or AF to render targets, so that's not an option for now. In Halo on the PC, the only way to get rid of the jaggies is to pump up the resolution.

[RoachMojo]

Then someone explain these screenshots I just took....

Sorry, but I don't know how to post multiple shots.

I played the whole game with 2xaf and it looked wayyy better than without af.

[RoachMojo]

2xaf

[RoachMojo]

4xaf

[JonathanM]

Yeah, I see the difference. How come it wasn't around this morning at 6 AM? ;)

The area where I see the most difference (between the no AF and 4X AF shots is the area above the extension of the gun (in front of where it says 60). The grass and rock above that extension looks hazier in the no AF shot.

But why would the lead rendering engineer state that AF makes no difference then? He surely has had his fare share of working with the FX-series of cards (since PS 2.0 makes use of partial precision hints to improve the performance, he definitly must of had his hand in employing this).

[RoachMojo]

Originally posted by JonathanM
But why would the lead rendering engineer state that AF makes no difference then?

Dude, you got me. Of course, it looks even better with 8XAF, but the framerate hit is way too high. BTW, I forgot to disable vsync in those shots, so add another 8fps to them! I also saw no graphical anomolies throughout the whole game from having AF enabled.

I want someone else to see this and comment, because it definitely works for me. If you load up pshop and switch between all three shots really fast, the difference is amazingly clear.

Thanks for confirming that for me!

[saturnotaku]

AF works perfectly fine for me as well. 8x performance on my 9500 come 9700 Pro looks great. There's a huge difference in quality between using AF and not.

[oldsk00l]

-useff makes it look ugly as hell

[betterdan]

Tried the fix to enable using AA in games. Looked like crap! :( Turned it back happy now.:)