It's been years since I played it on period hardware, but Halo CE on PC was kind of a hog in its day. You are essentially skating on the minimum system requirements, this game came out in late 2003 so it was not uncommon to own a fast Pentium 4 or Athlon XP or even Athlon 64 and GeForce4, FX or Radeon 9600++ cards at the time. Even in high end systems, it proved to be quite a struggle to maintain 60fps at resolutions above 1024x768.

Anyway, since you've tried lowering the resolution and graphical details and see zero change in performance, it is safe to assume you are severely CPU limited. If the system is performing in a satisfactory way in other games, I would just forget about Halo. IMO, it would take at least a Tualatin 1.4 and GF4 Ti or one of the faster GeForceFX variants to make this experience pleasurable.

2003? In wiki it says that the release date was November 2001...

Halo for PC was released in 2003 and the downfall of FPS games began.

Ok I'll stick with older games then. Quake3 , Unreal Gold run excellent.

Halo was demanding for Radeon 9700 and Geforce FX at high res
geforce 2 will run with lots of effects disabled and not very fast,

the game was originally made (I know it was originally multiplatform, but it switched to that hardware spec) for the Xbox which had a geforce 3/4ti style GPU, but highly optimized and at low resolution.

Well, I know I never had much problems paying the game with a 2ghz northwood and a voodoo5500 back in the day. But The voodoo did not support anything like pixel shader, try truning off things like pixel shader and stuff, a GF2 should be more then able to play the game at 800x600 if its a 64mb card with some of the setting set lower.

oh and I'm not nuts, halo can be played on a voodoo5500
http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1092

Just fired this up on a machine I've been playing with recently...

Pentium III 1.4Ghz, 256mb Ram, 815e Chipset, 128mb Nvidia FX5200 PCI (64bit Memory) @ 300/475, Windows 2000 SP4.

Video Settings :-

800x600
No V-Sync
Specular :- No
Shadows :- No
Decals :- No
Particles :- Low
Texture Quality :- Medium

I'm getting 20-30 FPS in the first "training screen" After, when running in the corridors I'm getting anywhere from 30-50, some dips down to 18 in highly populated areas.

the game offered shader 2.0, 1.1 and fixed function mode, so if you run with a geforce 2, geforce 3/4 or newer the load and effects are different, I suppose the 5200 PCI runs in shader 1.1 mode?

I'm assuming it's related to CPU bottleneck since none of the graphic settings have any affect to the FPS. I think my extra 400mhz with addtional cache is making the difference here.

Both my crippled FX5200 and the Geforce 2 should be on/around the same pace here.

I think it has to probably do with the sloppy way Gearbox ported it (just before Halo they had ported Crazy Taxi with performance issues). Any plasma weapon overheating tends to make the fillrate crap itself, which has me thinking they have some combine ops going on with everything or unneccessary alpha modulation on all additive stuff (instead of like, uh...modulating the color to black). It definitely doesn't reflect its Mac-era performance in the prerelease footage on obviously-pre-Geforce3 hardware 😀

I used to think the PC version was just as good as the XBOX version in the visual department, but it turns out it lacks a few features and effects.

Digital Foundry had a great video on the original game and they touch on newer version of the game, such as the PC version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6NSm54ImcA

I remember there being some kind of fast shader patch for the multiplayer mode. Or Custom Edition some such.

Maybe this
http://hce.halomaps.org/?nid=105

F2bnp wrote:

I used to think the PC version was just as good as the XBOX version in the visual department, but it turns out it lacks a few features and effects.

Digital Foundry had a great video on the original game and they touch on newer version of the game, such as the PC version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6NSm54ImcA

yes that's kind of disappointing, but overall the PC version is more enjoyable to play due to resolution alone, I played the entire campaign on the XB and PC and those differences I didn't notice easily without the side by side comparison, now resolution and framerate is easy, still looks great on the Xbox on a CRT TV... but I no longer have the Xbox.

one interesting thing is that on my (limited) testing the 9500PRO is a good bit faster than the FX5900SE, not a big surprise since it's DX9, but on benchmakrs from back in the day the FX was faster, maybe it's because I used drivers from 2008 or something, but the difference is very clear, the 9500PRO perhaps suffers more with some effects, but overall is clearly smoother.

but those cards can't really keep a 30fps stable at 1024x768, with a p4 3GHz
not sure which card is needed for 60FPS lock, but when I played it on my 5850 it was very easy with low GPU usage, I'm guessing something like a x800xt already can get close to that level?

I agree with you, I'd take higher res any day of the week. Just thought it was cool to point it out 😁.

And yes, it is a very demanding game on PC. Xbitlabs used to be an amazing resource for these years, but it went down at the start of the year with almost no warning. Fortunately, I was able to find this, there were also graphs for 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, but the links are dead.

So yeah, you're not far off there!

Hello again. I'm kind of looking for a dx9 agp card that could boost the performance of that pc. I found a couple geforce 6200 128mb and 256mb, an FX 5200 128mb, an FX 5700 256mb, a Radeon 9500 Pro 128mb and a Radeon 9550 256mb.
Which one of the above would be the best choice for some 2003-2004 games (Halo CE, Doom3, FarCry, HalfLife2, GTA SA) on a P3 1000B? I'm leaning towards the FX 5700 or the 9500 Pro.

I'd say radeon is faster but would be bottlenecked by a P3 1ghz.

I built a 5700 Ultra with a Pent4 3ghz w/HT system back when it was new. Before that it was a 1.2ghz Taulatin with a GF3 Ti200.

With the P4 w/HT system even at 800x600 Doom3 was spotty to were it never even played it very long . HL2 had to drop DX7 or 8 but did finish the game on that system.

My point is I don't think those games will run well on that P3.

Honestly Halo was a hog in its day, I ran it with my buddies at lan parties, on a Duron 1600 with 512mb of ram and an MX440 and it was barely playable, so im not surprised at your slowness

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

I'd say radeon is faster but would be bottlenecked by a P3 1ghz. […]
Show full quote

I'd say radeon is faster but would be bottlenecked by a P3 1ghz.

I built a 5700 Ultra with a Pent4 3ghz w/HT system back when it was new. Before that it was a 1.2ghz Taulatin with a GF3 Ti200.

With the P4 w/HT system even at 800x600 Doom3 was spotty to were it never even played it very long . HL2 had to drop DX7 or 8 but did finish the game on that system.

My point is I don't think those games will run well on that P3.

So what would be a decent upgrade in order to reach the maximum potential of the 1000eb, apart from the ram which could be maximised to 384mb? Would the 6200 and fx5200 also be bottlenecked by the cpu? I have seen a video of a P3 866mhz running doom3 on a Geforce6200, quiet good, maybe 20-30fps.

tanasen wrote:

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

I'd say radeon is faster but would be bottlenecked by a P3 1ghz. […]
Show full quote

I'd say radeon is faster but would be bottlenecked by a P3 1ghz.

I built a 5700 Ultra with a Pent4 3ghz w/HT system back when it was new. Before that it was a 1.2ghz Taulatin with a GF3 Ti200.

With the P4 w/HT system even at 800x600 Doom3 was spotty to were it never even played it very long . HL2 had to drop DX7 or 8 but did finish the game on that system.

My point is I don't think those games will run well on that P3.

So what would be a decent upgrade in order to reach the maximum potential of the 1000eb, apart from the ram which could be maximised to 384mb? Would the 6200 and fx5200 also be bottlenecked by the cpu? I have seen a video of a P3 866mhz running doom3 on a Geforce6200, quiet good, maybe 20-30fps.

You can try a Radeon 9800 Pro/Geforce 6600GT they could run it at Ultra at 1024x768