A good build for playing Halo:CE \ VOGONS

A good build for playing Halo:CE

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First post, by appiah4

Posted on 2018-12-25, 06:35

appiah4 Offline

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I remember playing this game on my AthlonXP + Radeon 8500 back in the day, and it was not the most pleasant experience. The Gearbox port did not seem to have much done in the way of PC optimizations (it wasn't a common thing to do at the time I suppose) and I never went back to playing it on PC once I got an XBOX in 2003 along with Halo 1 and 2.

So now I am wondering, what kind of a PC does it take to actually run the game decently well on, say 1024x768 or 1280x1024?

Reply 1 of 3, by Davros

Posted on 2018-12-25, 10:45

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It ran fine on a 9800pro
the game can use pixel shader 1.4 which the competing nv cards didnt support

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Reply 2 of 3, by deleted_nk

Posted on 2018-12-25, 11:17

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Top end hardware from around 2003-04 such as an Athlon 64 and a Pentium 4 based system will be a big part of it, since Halo CE was pretty hard on CPU usage IIRC. GPU wise you can pair it up with either a Radeon 9800 / x800 or even a Geforce 6800 card. Those combinations should allow for a stable 60fps at 1280x1024 with settings around high, with the ability to go even higher depending on the GPU used.

Reply 3 of 3, by The Serpent Rider

Posted on 2018-12-25, 18:31

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The Gearbox port did not seem to have much done in the way of PC optimizations

Gearbox has nothing to do with that. Halo worked at 640x480 30 fps (with some slowdowns) on Xbox hardware with GeForce 3/4 equivalent. Blame Bungie engine, if you must. Of course it won't work any better on DX8 class GPUs. CPU is not a real problem in most cases*, but beefy GPU is a must.
That said, the real way to play Halo CE this days is with mods, and those won't work good on any "period correct" hardware.

*Some particular sections of the game are indeed CPU heavy, but there aren't many.

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