Got Halo over the weekend and have to say it's been fun so far....BUT....
I agree with people ref the graphics. The whole game seems to be a mixed bag, with some scenes looking amazing and running smooth as butter - but other scenes that run like a 1 legged dog. One thing that struck me was the grass in the otside levels - if I crouch and look at the ground it's all pixelly. Does everyone else get this as it looks awful. Stranglely, I can go up close to a tree and the detail stays sharp - I find it odd that the ground textures used are so low.
With ref to the performance - Something has gone very wrong here somewhere !.
I'm sure that many people remember when Halo was headed for a PC before MS sngged it for the Xbox - Well, all the videos we saw at the time were supposedly running at 1024 x 768 and were smooth as butter - and this was on 3yr old technology !!!. I believe that the HW that Bungie used to demo the game at that time was a P3 1Ghz with 256MB mem and a nVideaTNT2 Ultra (64MB) graphics card - Hardly speedy at all by todays standards.
I know that they've added pixel shaders into the game but has this really causes such a performance hit compared to the original HW platform that it was intended to be released on? Looking back at the original vids of the game I can't really see any effects that PS have added that warrants such a performance hit.
I'd have rather had higher detail textures (Especially the grass).
Don't get me wrong - I'm really enjoying the game, but something's gone wrong with the port somewhere along the line - and as mentioned, Halo was originally going to released on the PC over 2yrs ago so I'd imagine that they must have had approx 30fps at that time on much older HW.