heyy! well i am not entirely sure what sort of graphics card i have, but all i know is that i didnt have enough to play elder scrolls IV Oblivion and i was a little upset. Its one of the basic dell graphic cards i had gotten with my computer recently. what sort of graphics card did you need for the first halo for the pc, and what one do you think will be required for this one. Do you think it my be a rele good one needed? If i can find out what one i have i will post it here!

Minimum for the first Halo was 32MB, still works better on a 128. Halo 2 will almost definately be a 256MB min. You will definately need a good graphics card for Halo 2.

so what do you think would be the minimum brand of graphics card?

The brand? Well, i'd guess Nvidia or ATI Radeon cards.

Your choice of brand is down to personal preference. There's no info released on Halo2's system requirements, but seeing as it'll be on Vista it'll probably be something like a DX10 card, 1 gig RAM and a 3Ghz P4 or an AMD equivalent. Note that I'm guessing these are the minimum requirements, basing on the fact Crysis is such a systemhog too and Halo1 on the PC was poorly coded to be optimized to specific hardware.

I have always been meaning to get a new graphics card, are either one of these good? ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 Edition Radeon 9600 Video Card and ATI Radeon X1600 Pro Video Card? Lol as you can see im kinda on a budget of under $150.

I have a Nvidia 256MB card i got for $125. Now my CD burner needs replacing.

Care to share what videocard you have, Sphinx? Just the memory doesn't make much of a difference, the clock speeds, pipelines and memory interface do.

I have a BFG Tech Geforce FX5500 OC 256MB 128-bit DDR PCI Video Card. Question, is a PCI card or one that uses AGP better, becuase my cousin has an ATI card, 256MB, that he can't use becuase it's AGP, and he wants to trade. I'm not very computer literate, at least as far as the hardware goes. I just recently got a computer good enough to play games, so i'm learning as i go.

ummm... before you all start talkin bout eachothers gcs', can anybody tell me if either of the two i put up are reasonable cards? ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 Edition Radeon 9600 Video Card and ATI Radeon X1600 Pro Video Card.

Well, i searched for the cards, and the ATI Radeon X1600 pro is $230. Here is the page i found. There is a details link above the price on the page. The All-In-Wonder card i found here. Also you have to take into account the slot you want to use. The X1600 uses PCI, while the All-InWonder uses AGP. X1600 is a 512MB while the other is a 256MB. I, persoanlly would go with the X1600, but if your buying on a budget, then the All-In-Wonder is only $90, if bought from the site i posted. All up to you. Unless somebody else wants to add something, i'm not really an expert, just a fast learner. I still don't know much, as i have only had one computer that i have played games on and just bought my card about 5 months ago.

A 5500 is really, really outdated. I doubt it'll play Halo2 even on DX9, in fact I doubt it even runs Halo1 decently because of the horrible hardware optimisation (not entirely your cards fault). Oh and Ninja, the x1600 and 9600 are similar, and both quite outdated too, well the x1600 never was any good. I'd say look more towards the 6600GT (or even better; 6800GS) if you're on a budget. The fact the X1600 has 512mb's of memory doesn't make it any better, just to clear that out. It's more about the core, clockspeeds and pipelines. You'd be better of saving a bit more, in the end it'll be worth it, unless it's being bottlenecked by your processor.
If you want a cheap, yet pretty high end card, get a 7600GT like mine. It only comes in PCI-e though, and I doubt most of you have a PCI-e compatible motherboard. So far, it runs any game I throw at it at 1280x1024 at maximum settings, most with 4xAA and 16xAF.
Even FEAR runs great with 2xAA/4xAF.
Not bad for a €173,- card.

Well, the 5500 i got for my birthday, so i didn't pick it. BTW, Halo 1 did run smoothly on my comp, but my processor is way outdated (pentium 3) so now i', trying to get a new motherboard and processor and then a newer card, which i probably won't get for a while, at least until Vista and Halo 2 are released.

quote sphinx162

Minimum for the first Halo was 32MB, still works better on a 128. Halo 2 will almost definately be a 256MB min. You will definately need a good graphics card for Halo 2.

Halo 2 will probably run alright on lowish-medium settings with a decent 128 card. The graphics weren't that great.

In any case, it's too early to speculate about hardware requirements.