A couple important notes to start off with; anisotropic filtering and antialiasing DO NOT have any visual effect on Halo but it does have a major effect on the framerates and playability. The reason behind this is Halo renders the game a little differently due to some of the cool effects like the camouflage and the zoom on the sniper rifle. Without getting into the technicalities behind this, just understand that neither does anything and they should both be off for Halo. As a further addendum to this point, the options in the graphic card utilities that forces vsync on or off will affect benchmark numbers as well as a multitude of other things. It is beyond the scope of this article to go through that in detail but be aware that if those settings have been altered, performance will likely be affected. Secondly, do update Halo to 1.02 or above as there are some quirks with the way that timedemo works with the shipping executable.

One of the pictures has 6x AA and 8x Aniso. Cant tell which is which huh?

Halo has a few different rendering paths, PS 2.0 for DX9 based cards, PS 1.4 for ATi DX8 cards, PS 1.1 for GF3/4 based cards and Fixed Function for DX7 cards. By default, Halo detects what your card supports but a lower quality rendering path can be chosen for better performance. To force the game into one of these modes you can use one of the following command line switches:

-use20 [For PS 2.0]

-use14 [For PS 1.4]

-use11 [For PS 1.1]

-useff [For Fixed Function]

How to use command line switches:

• Right click on the Halo shortcut and select properties
• There is a box that says target field and there will be something similar to ?C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Halo\halo.exe?which would need to be changed to ?C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Halo\halo.exe? ?use11 ?nosound
• Note that the command line switches are outside of the quotes and you can add as many as you like.
• Other command line options include
• ?screenshot [allows screencaps with printscrn in game]
• ?console [enables console with ~]
• -width1024 [forces 1024x768. -width640 forces 640x480 etc etc]
• ?nosound [disables sound]
• ?help [lists other commands not touched on in this article]
• ?timedemo [timedemo mode ? explored further in the article]

Besides changing the rendering path, there are a lot of visual options that can be tweaked within the video settings menu inside of Halo to improve framerates. Here?s a brief run down on what will net the biggest gains in performance:

• Shadows- Shadowing is an expensive rendering operation (4-7%)

Fancy Shadows Under Covenant	Alien lights dont cast shadows

• Particles ? this includes the quality of effects such as explosions and muzzle flashes (3-5%)

BOOM	boom	Flaccid is an understatement

• Texture quality ? How sharp textures look. (1-5%)
• Specular ? a lighting effect that applies highlights to models (1-3%)
• Decals ? blood, marks on walls (1-2%)

Play around with these settings to find an acceptable compromise between visual quality and performance. Most of the settings have several different levels so it is not necessary to turn them completely off. Sound can also affect framerates, with the biggest hit coming from a lack of hardware acceleration, a feature most modern cards support. The other options affect framerates less but they can probably scrape up an extra frame or two here and there with some tweaking.