Benchmarking With Halo For PC

Thanks to ExtremeTech for their article discussing comparative benchmarking of PCs using newly-released FPS Halo. The piece explains how to "add a few command line options to the [Halo] shortcut" to enable benchmarking, which "runs through several of the game's cut-scenes", and the final page of the article has results for ATI and NVidia's current high-end graphics cards. The article concludes: "Halo is not the most elegant console game port, and given what you see on the screen it's odd how slowly it runs at times... Still, the Halo benchmark is a pretty good graphics card test- at once stressful, deterministic, and scalable with both graphics cards and CPUs."

Comments

Re:Bad Port - Very True

[@madeus]

I've been saying this to people for ages (in my /. posts too).

The X-Box origional was visualy stunning and used the console very well (particularly given it was a launch title). It was obviously designed to take advantage of the specific strenghts (and limitations) of the console.

The PC port is a shoddy straight forward could-have-been-done-with-an-emulation-layer port of the X-Box version that althought (like the origional) it uses a few DX9 effects, take no consideration of the advantages of PC gaming hardware.

The FPS is piss poor, it's noteably wrose than the Doom 3 leak (and the exuses that it has it's own rendering engine being the reason for it being unable to support any FSAA just make it look all the more like a throw away port that Microsoft/Bungie didn't care about).

The PC net code is dire too, I have had less lag with X-Box Halo on the net (using a Linux gateway).

No wonder that Counter Strike : Condition Zero went from being in Gearbox's hands to getting done by Ritual. More fool Gearbox for taking this one on. I don't think it makes Bungie look good either.