Or at least something that would make it look as good as the screenshots on Gamepro.com. Right now I have a GeForce 4 MX 64 MB, but the graphics look pretty sad. I don’t have $500 to spend on the latest from nVidia, so what gives the best bang for around 100 bucks?
Great game, by the way.
You’re gonna be hard-pressed to find something for $100 that supports DirectX 9b and gives the full “Halo” experience.
I hear that the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro is a great card. You can find them at PriceWatch.com for about $150+
I’m running Halo on:
P4 2.4ghz
512mb DDR 2700 RAM
GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
I have to run the game at 800x600 32bit color, with nearly all the special effects turned off to get a playable framerate. Even then I have yet to be wowed by the graphics.
Needless to say, I am NOT impressed with this game. :mad:
From what i have read about halo it would take a beast of a system to run it with all the eye candy. I would probably suggest the 9600 pro or the geforce 5600 ultra as the cards to get…they are a little more than what you suggested…probably $120-$180 but are fairly future proof and while not on the bleeding edge of technology they are solid cards.
Check out Pricewatch for a very comprehensive listing of components and companys offering them (If you go for the cheapest company in whatever category pay attention to what you are buying). Also, i have bought quite a bit of computer hardware from Newegg.com and they are a good company…not the cheapest, but good customer service and generally good prices.
Here’s a review of a lot of vid cards that will give you an idea of the improvement you should get. tomshardware.com
I have a brand new system with these specs:
> Processor: Dual XEON 3.0GHz
> Memory: 1024MB PC3200 DDR400 Memory
> Primary Display Card: Nvidia GeForceFX 5600 256MB Dual Display
This system screams for LightWave rendering and MPEG-2 transcoding.
Halo chugs. It’s nearly acceptable at 800x600 with all the bells and whistles turned off.
Still, good game.
I’ve read that Halo runs pretty well on ATI cards and that it particularly has problems with the GeForce FX series. Thanks for the advice. Now it’s off to buy one.