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Halo PC Timedemo

Halo for PC was only released last month. Because it was completely rewritten with DirectX 9 support it took a long time to port the game to the PC platform. Halo has been receiving some flak due to its apparently poor performance on even high end hardware - especially since it's game engine ignores Anisotropic Filtering and Anti-Aliasing. We received beta test versions of the game from Microsoft several months back and we were shocked at the speeds we obtained at 1024x768 resolution.

Now, with the game in public release, most of you will find the performance to be still pretty demanding. It turns out that the game's use of pixel shader 2.0 causes a lot of grief for Nvidia FX owners. Thankfully, Nvidia scrambled to optimize their drivers and version 52.16, which we use in our benchmarks, has some significant performance enhancements over the 45.XX series - the 45.XX drivers is the series used in most benchmarks where the ATI cards totally abolished the NVIDIA cards on this benchmark.

For our benchmarks we used the built in Timedemo function of Halo. The built in Timedemo functionality takes 4 in-game cutscenes and times how long it takes to render all the frames in the scenes. Tweakfactor has an article on tweaking and benchmarking Halo and their guide will allow you to compare your results against ours.

We're also using the patched 1.02 game. If you are comparing your benchmarks with ours you MUST use version 1.02 or above of the game. Any prior version has significantly different framerate reporting because the timedemo would examine memory consumption for every frame rendered... which adds a HUGE overhead. Note also that because the Halo Timedemo has to load different cut scenes in sequence, it is sensitive to system variations: hard drive, memory, and system performance all contribute in part to the results obtained in this benchmark.

For our testing we decided to examine Halo using both pixel shader 2.0 and pixel shader 1.4. The game itself can be configured to use all three pixel shader versions (the third being 1.1).

By default Halo uses MS's HLSL with pixel shader 2.0. From the above you can see that the 5950 is around 5% slower than the RADEON 9800PRO and about 10% slower than the overclocked 9800PRO at 1024x768. However, when you push up to 1600x1200, the 5950 pushes ahead of even the overclocked 9800PRO.

With shader 1.4 the 5950 has really close results in both resolutions, but interestingly enough here the overclocked 9800PRO seems to gain more from moving down to pixel shader 1.4 at the 1600x1200 resolution. I just find it interesting since it's widely assumed that the FX cards are the ones to gain the most out of moving away from the default shader 2.0 codepath.