HALO has invaded my life.

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Ok we all know and understand that HALO belongs to the mac. without getting to into the debate about it I am looking to buy a powerbook 15 inch 1.25. It comes with a Raedon 9600 64 mb.

Does anyone have HALO and run it on their power book? I have HALO for PC (no bashing please it's just for games) and I have a 9600 SE 128 mb on it and I pump out 30fps (controled) at 640 by 480.

I wanna know how the performence is on HALO so when I go to Dallas for the big HALO Cyber Athelete Pro Championship. (signing up for my spot now as we speak). I would really really like to win with my a Mac and stick it to everyone. And a powerbook would be a perfect companion for the event and within my budget. (the book willbe used primarily for work than play).

Anyway if anyone has any info on this please let me know. Wish me luck as well as I'm pretty sure I'm one of the very Few if not only Mac Player thast will be there.
 
I have the PowerBook 15 inch 1.25, and I play Halo with my roomies all the time. I have my settings mostly on the low side 640x480, etc, and I get a great framerate, even with iTunes playing and AIM open in the background. It is definitely very playable, and fast enough to let you win that contest. Granted, it won't look amazingly beautiful, like it does on your 9600 SE 128, but I am sure it will fit your Halo needs just grand. Go for it. It's great.

EDIT: And, hell, just for kicks, here's a screenshot. We put grenades under a car, and launched it up onto that hill. And the car ended up getting impaled by the tree. Weird.
 

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I've had similar experiences like that on the XBox. You can usually flip it over. One time I needed to rocket launch it a couple of times after getting it stuck between 2 buildings. Had to frag my gunner but I got it. :D

Now, just waiting for Halo 2...
 
Thanks for the information. I have 9600SE and I have it set to those settings,640x480 with most options off. Gearbox did a crappy job porting the game. But with the new 1.5 128 9700 Portable Raedon I'm sure it'll kick ass. Thanks for tha advice.
 
:(
Halo runs horribly on my BRAND NEW 12" Powerbook. I have 768MEG of RAM, a 1.33GHz processor, and a 64MEG NVIDIA card, and, well, Halo runs like cr@p. Framerates are too low to play.

Halo worked okay when I first bought the Powerbook, but then--like an idiot--I upgraded Halo to version 1.05, which hurt performance, and then--even more of an idiot--I upgraded MacOS to 10.3.4, which dropped the framerate to the point where the game was not longer fun to play.

I can't comprehend how MacSoft could release a game which only works on the highest of the high-end Mac computers. And why they added EVEN more graphics functionality in v1.05--which hurt rather than improved performance--makes me feel like they have the wrong people making decisions at that company. Why can't they spend their time making Halo more playable on consumer-grade Macs? :mad: Very frustrating for a new Mac owner.
 
mdanda said:
:(
Halo runs horribly on my BRAND NEW 12" Powerbook. I have 768MEG of RAM, a 1.33GHz processor, and a 64MEG NVIDIA card, and, well, Halo runs like cr@p. Framerates are too low to play.

Halo worked okay when I first bought the Powerbook, but then--like an idiot--I upgraded Halo to version 1.05, which hurt performance, and then--even more of an idiot--I upgraded MacOS to 10.3.4, which dropped the framerate to the point where the game was not longer fun to play.

I can't comprehend how MacSoft could release a game which only works on the highest of the high-end Mac computers. And why they added EVEN more graphics functionality in v1.05--which hurt rather than improved performance--makes me feel like they have the wrong people making decisions at that company. Why can't they spend their time making Halo more playable on consumer-grade Macs? :mad: Very frustrating for a new Mac owner.
Click to expand...

The video chipsets in those 12" powerbooks suck. The FX 5200 Go is not a very powerful chipset.

Halo uses very advanced features to provide the higher quality texture effects. The official OpenGL standard for Pixel Shaders are Fragment Programs. They're only supported in hardware Radeon 9600, 9700, 9800, and NVIDIA FX 5200 chipsets. The 5200 Fragment Program performance isn't that great.

The reason they added more graphical effects with newer versions was because people they were able to. Lots of people were complaining about only Radeon 9600 and 9800s getting all the shiny goodness, so now Halo has the NV Shaders. I believe the NV shaders are implemented using NVIDIA specific extensions called Register Combiners. Of course performance is going to take a hit when you enable those features. The card is doing a lot more work. Why is that hard to understand?

I haven't seen any performance drop with 10.3.4 but I stay away from NVIDIA hardware. There seem to be some major issues with the NVIDIA FX 5200 Go drivers. Blizzard is having problems with World of Warcraft performance on the 12" PowerBooks because of it. I've heard that some folks got their performance back after dumping the Halo preferences, but with the driver issues, I don't think that'd be applicable in this scenario.
 
I don't know if it will help, but Bare Feats had some interesting advice for improving performance with Halo. They were talking about G5s, but the information about not using pixel shaders and lens flares might help you with your Powerbook.

Doug


From Bare Feats (www.barefeats.com):
"HALO "sane" Settings -- a balance between speed and visual quality
Vertex Shaders Only* [or no shaders]
4X FSAA [turn off for sure for your Powerbook]
Detail Objects ON [off]
Lens Flare LOW* [off]
Model Quality HIGH [low]
Resolution 1024x768 [8x6 or 640x480]
. . .
Sound ON, Quality LOW [If you can stand it, play with sound OFF.]

* Pixel Shaders "eat" the most frames per second followed by Lens Flare. Therefore, those were turned OFF or set to LOW. You get a small hit from FSAA being on, but it's worth it to eliminate the jaggies.
 
Ive tried this with every thing set to low or off but it still looks horrible and the fps are down to about 5. Its not too bad untill there is sombody else on screen then its unplayable. I have a g4 imac 700mhz with 512 ram. Is there anything else I could try?
 
Laurie,

I'm pretty sure the GeForce 2mx graphics card in your iMac is just not powerful enough for Halo. There's not much you can do about it.

If you're looking for great (single player) first person shooters, you could try 'No One Lives Forever', Jedi Knight II, Medal of Honor, Deus Ex (old but amazing), Ghost Recon, etc. if you haven't played them yet. These _should_ run okay on your machine. You will likely have to turn down the graphics settings to a certain extent, depending on the game.

Doug
 
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