Halo 2 displaying udderly bad performance.

[accelleron]

Yes, udderly. As in, sucking a cow tit.

Here are my specs:
C2Duo 7200 (2.00x2, 4mb cache)
GeForce Go 7900GS /256mb
1 gig ram
Vista Ultimate

The above are enough to run oblivion without a hitch, GRAW without a hitch, Doom 3... FEAR... bla bla bla...

Then there's Halo 2.

When I start / load a game, the first solid 5 minutes (timed it, folks) the game starts with 1 frame per 5 seconds and moves up to 15 fps, where it stays.

This problem exhibits itself even when halo is run at 800x600 with low settings. That and constant stuttering.

I thought it was the ram, so I upped the virtual mem to 2GB/4GB. Nada.

Is Halo really advanced enough to warrant this kind of lag, am I missing some retardedly obvious detail, or is a bad port really all m-soft and bungie can do in 3 years?

[legionaire45]

Virtual memory probably isn't going to help you. Get more RAM.

But yes, it is a pretty bad port considering the original game ran on an 800 mhz Celeron/Pentium 3 hybrid thinger and a Geforce 3 without a hitch.

[Mr Buckshot]

Legionaire, the reason why Halo 2 ran well on the xbox was because it was optimized specifically for those parts, plus the Xbox OS is nowhere near as complicated as Windows so you don't have to compensate for background stuff. On a PC you have a complicated Windows OS plus all those malware scanners, firewalls, etc - of course a more powerful PC is required. But that means that H2V should at least LOOK the way it did on the xbox with a DX8 card (the game unfairly requires at least DX9 when it barely even uses it). So yeah, I agree H2V is among the shittiest ports ever. It's a shame that its porting job nearly kills the excellent game within.

acceleron, I believe you are actually getting high framerates in H2V. Zeph's laptop has the same video card as yours. The problem, according to him, is that when H2V's frames get very high, the game itself can't keep up so it starts to slow down despite big numbers. Therefore, 100 fps on H2V will actually feel laggy. You should force the game to run at your refresh rate (I assume that as a laptop display it's 60 hz). I don't know why you can't simply lock the game at 30 fps the way it was possible in Halo 1 for PC.

[accelleron]

Legionaire, the reason why Halo 2 ran well on the xbox was because it was optimized specifically for those parts, plus the Xbox OS is nowhere near as complicated as Windows so you don't have to compensate for background stuff. On a PC you have a complicated Windows OS plus all those malware scanners, firewalls, etc - of course a more powerful PC is required. But that means that H2V should at least LOOK the way it did on the xbox with a DX8 card (the game unfairly requires at least DX9 when it barely even uses it). So yeah, I agree H2V is among the shittiest ports ever. It's a shame that its porting job nearly kills the excellent game within.

acceleron, I believe you are actually getting high framerates in H2V. Zeph's laptop has the same video card as yours. The problem, according to him, is that when H2V's frames get very high, the game itself can't keep up so it starts to slow down despite big numbers. Therefore, 100 fps on H2V will actually feel laggy. You should force the game to run at your refresh rate (I assume that as a laptop display it's 60 hz). I don't know why you can't simply lock the game at 30 fps the way it was possible in Halo 1 for PC.

When you switch resolutions, it gives you one option (in my case) for refresh rate, 60hz, which implies that the game is running at 60 hz.

As for the too fast theory, wouldn't my game performance improve then if I ran it at 1920x1200 on high, which I tried? Because with those settings I barely got 15 fps, and still had to deal with the 5-minute-loading-lag shitstorm.

I believe you that H2 is an excellent game. Unfortunately, it wasn't ported too excellently, and the fact that nvid has no valid vista drivers doesn't help (although I'm using Dell's 101.19 forceware drivers, updating to which didn't help at all)

Legionaire, I agree with you that getting more ram might speed up my performance in most games, but nonetheless I think this is a problem that goes far beyond my ram, given this game's 5-minute "warmup time" for each level.

That's the factor, really, I'm most interested in getting rid of - the warmup time.

[Con]

Your specs are similar to mine before I got another gig of RAM. H2V ran well before I got that extra ram though; your problem is very strange. It was just a poor port, we've been saying the graphics engine was inefficient and outdated for a long time. Too bad they probably won't do anything about it. The only updates we're likely to get are in the even of some cheats that come out which need to be thwarted.

[Mr Buckshot]

Try turning down to low settings. Trust me, on low settings H2V looks as good as its Xbox brother, and on high settings it doesn't look much better (and for the very slight improvements you get lowered frames :O).

I have 1 GB of RAM and a Geforce 7600 GT with an Athlon 64 X2 3800+. Your laptop's specs own my desktop's 100% flat-out so you'll do better than I will in every game. Currently I run at 1680x1050 (native res) on low graphical settings and I can get between 30 and 60 fps. When I go to 640x480 on low settings, the framerates skyrocket but the gameplay can streak and go from too fast to too slow or something.

My laptop has a 2.13Ghz Intel Pentium M 770 (centrino first-gen), 1 GB RAM< and Geforce 6600 - settings are 1280x720 on high (that's as close as I can get to my native res of 1280x800), and I can get xbox-quality performance.

Play around with your video settings, try to remain at the 1920x1200 res. Maybe enable AA and AF to experiment.

[beele]

Have you tried to update your video drivers to newer ones (the ones available on http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/drivers/vista). (I'm using the 163.11 drivers on my laptop, with a nvidia 8600M GT). These drivers are hacked with a new .ini file to work on laptops.

Other then that, I can see no problem in your specs. (even the 1GB ram should do fine, but 2GB will give you smoother gameplay).

[Zeph]

I have the same setup, except for 2GB of RAM and a 1920x1200 monitor. As someone mentioned before, try setting your framerate to be constant at 30 fps or the same as your screen's refresh rate. Piss poor mouse acceleration (the game considers a nudge of your mouse/keyboard like a nudge of the controller stick and considers sustained movement very similarly) doesn't help at all at the higher resolutions. If youre having problems at 800x600 it's just a bad port. The loading lag is your RAM. Vista tries to preload application data that you're most likely to use to free available memory. It does keep a large portion of it freely available, but if it has to read something from disk it's going to go as fast as whatever the hard drive can spit out. My guess is you've got a 5400 rpm drive.

[Pooky]

You might try running it on XP if that's an option for you, I'm playing it on medium at 1024 x 768 with a mere radeon x1600 pro and 1 gig of RAM on XP, with at least 30 FPS at all times. I've had no problems whatsoever with mouse acceleration or anything else.

[Echo 418]

uh... i had the same problem so... i resolve it... just use the classic windows skin, hide your icons, use ONLY THE PROGRAMS YOU NEED... example:
Close the live messenger task
Close the sidebar(hide the sidebar work too)
Dont use any wallpaper...

Its just a example so close ALL the programs are running EXEPT the windows normals tasks...

Note: the sidebar is not a windows normal task...