MSI FX5950 Ultra - Page 14

Halo

Halo is a sci-fi shooter that takes place on a mysterious alien ring-world. Packed with combat, Halo will have you battling on foot, and in vehicles, inside and outdoors with Alien and Human weaponry. Your objective: to uncover Halo's horrible secrets and destroy mankind's sworn enemy, the Covenant.

The game supports the latest shader technology of pixel shaders 2.0. Of course the graphics are somewhat better on a PC than an Xbox, since most of the game's shader effects have been redesigned to support the latest 2.0 shaders in DX9. Having in mind that there are few games supporting 2.0 pixel shaders, Halo is a good test for VGA card performance with shader technology.

A prominent disadvantage of the game, is its lack of Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering support. If you get the strange idea to enable these settings via the control panel of your card, you will experience no difference in graphics quality as well as slowing things down and losing performance.

- Halo Benchmark

For the Halo benchmark, I set the default settings with pixel shaders 2.0 in the following resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and the awesome 1600x1200. I used the time-demo command to execute the default benchmark sequence and here are the results.

On Halo, the X800XT seems almost undisturbed by the successive increase in resolution, whereas MSI's Ultra drops significantly, just staying above 25 fps. Still, gameplay is very smooth with the first 2 resolutions and you'll get to enjoy every part of the game.