I just got Halo:Combat Evolved...I know its a little old, but I love the control, the multiplayer..but...when i go to play singler player missions...its lagging really bad. I dropped all the settings down as far as they can go, i have installed all the recent drivers for my geforce fx5500 as of 8/27/05...and im still lagging. heres some spec of my comp...hopefully one of you tech guys can help me out.

Athlon64 3400+ (2.2ghz)
1 G Ram
80 g Hard drive
Geforce Fx5500

-=IceRayne=-

I don't think that you should be lagging because I don't never lagged when I had a radeon 9200 SE 512 mb. athlon xp 2500+ of course grafics were not on hightest but it worked. Sorry I don't have any ideas just thought I would put in that info.

Is thereanything running in the backround (ex. Anti Virus) that could be effecting gameplay?

Thx for the thoughts...there is no anti-virus or anything else running in the backround. it is very strange...i can run games like F.E.A.R. and Doom 3 just fine...i had to drop the graphics quality...but a very minimal change.

IceRayne7

I just bought the MSI FX5500 256mb video card to replace my 128 TNT card to play HALO Online. I have an Asus MB with a Intel 2.6 P4 and 2 gb Corsair Matched Ram.

The new card plays EVERYTHING including Doom3 at Highest Res, BUT it sucks ay HALO.

Havent found out the reason yet. I got the card especially for HALO. I havent tried multiplayer yet, but I turned everything down to the lowest settings and it still lags big time in Single player mode.

I'll keep you posted. May be going back to my 128 TNT card.

FX-series cards have severe problems with higher precision Direct3D shaders, so this is a combination Halo and FX videocard problem.

Most other games will use lesser precision shaders when running on FX-class hardware. In all actuality, the FX series cards should not have included higher precision shader support as they severely lack the horsepower to use them. This causes games that "blindly" query the maximum capabilities to perform poorly. I don't believe Halo has a way to force lower precision shaders.

You may be able to use DirectX Tweaker to force FP16 shader but unsure how predictable this may work. It's worth a shot though and should help improve Halo performance tremendously if it works. FX-series cards perform GREAT with FP16 shaders, it's just the FP32 that kills them to sub-teen framerates best case scenario.

You can try DirectX Tweaker at:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/S...-Tweaker.shtml

Run the DirectX Control.exe... and try the following:
1) Right click on the Programs area and select "New"
2) On the right pane, call it Halo and use the Browse to hunt down the executable.
3) On the bottom right, click the checkbox for "Caps Changer"
4) Try setting the Vertex Shader tab's "Max Version" to 1.1
5) Try setting the Pixel Shader tab's "Max Version" to 1.1

This should force Halo to use DX7.0/8.0 level shaders with lower precision.. you can likely tweak the device capabilities more to go higher/lower with a little study/work. It's a nice tool to have until you can afford to get rid of that FX card and go with a newer 3d card.

Good luck!