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Halo: Combat EvolvedThose of you who haven't heard about HALO raise your hands please. you?! What do you mean you haven't heard about it?! Oh you're still gaming on a Dreamcast; daddy is a game reviewer, you say, and can't afford to buy you anything? Oh well, I guess we can let this one slide.
HALO was probably the biggest and certainly the most prominent launch title for Microsoft's Xbox console. You also probably know that Bungie actually originally intended to publish the game on the PC, but were kindly asked to change their mind, well ... bought by MS and help the birth of the Xbox. After two years of waiting, PC gamers can finally sink their teeth into the PC version of the game.
In Halo, you don the armor of the Master Chief; a war-hardened soldier that only comes out when the going gets really tough. The Earth is at war with a mysterious race called the Covenant and as the game opens, a Halcyon-class cruiser from Earth, the Pillar of Autumn, has dropped out of warp badly damaged. Worse yet, the Autumn is being pursued by a Covenant fleet. The Master Chief is given the mandate to get the ships main computer construct, Cortana, away from the cruiser as the captain crashes the battered Pillar of Autumn on a strange ring-shaped object (later to be known as Halo). You must get Cortana off of the Autumn and then keep yourself alive long enough figure out what secrets Halo hides.
Bungie decided to upgrade the engine in the PC version to support Pixel Shader 2.0 effects instead of the Pixel Shader 1.1 effects found on the Xbox version. This is noticeable in better shiny armor, water effects and better looking grass. To run Halo on the PC requires a pretty decent system.
Here again we show a variety of results.
Halo although less CPU stringent is still a little memory bandwidth sensitive, and the score shows that as the step from 400 MHZ DDR towards 533 MHz already offers an additional 3 FPS. Remember it's the cumulative number your need to focus on. A little extra performance from the memory, a slightly higher clocked FSB, somewhat faster CPU clock, a few tweaks here and there and the sum, well you can see that with the 275 MHz FSB enabled.Everest Home Edition
EVEREST Home Edition is a freeware hardware diagnostics and memory benchmarking solution for home PC users.It offers accurate hardware information and diagnostics capabilities, including online features, memory benchmarks, hardware monitoring, and low-level hardware information. EVEREST Home Edition is optimized for Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 operating systems, and it fully supports the XP look & feel.
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Everest is a tool that grows slowly on me, at the last minute I decided to include the results. Synthetic numbers simply are the best way to show you the exact difference between timing sand frequencies. Something that is very hard to show with games.
Charming and rather accurate reports are offered by a little benchmark suite especially for memory in this tool. Here we can see bandwidth grow once we alter all the goodness.
