Halo (Universal) 2.0.1--How Fast Is It?
On Friday, we noted that MacSoft had released version 2.0.1 for the Universal Binary edition of Halo for the Mac. One of the claimed features is increased speed on both PowerPC-based (up to 35 percent) and Intel-based (up to 25 percent) Macs.
We use the game Halo as one of our standard speed benchmarks so we ran it on both our 15" 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with ATI Radeon X1600 graphics and 24" 2.33 GHz iMac Core 2 Duo with the optional Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT graphics card. Here are the results from both Macs running Mac OS X 10.4.9:
|
Computer (Graphics)
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Halo 2.0
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Halo 2.0.1
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% Change
|
|
.
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|||
|
15" MacBook Pro C2D (ATI)
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55
|
69
|
+25
|
|
24" iMac C2D (Nvidia)
|
94
|
71
|
-24
|
Halo 2.0.1 on the MacBook Pro with ATI graphics is 25 percent faster as claimed by MacSoft. However, on the iMac with Nvidia graphics Halo 2.0.1 is nearly 25 percent SLOWER! [See Update below.] Just to be sure no mistakes were made, we re-installed Halo 2.0 and it ran at 94fps as before. After updating it again to 2.0.1, Halo ran at 71 fps, confirming the near 25 percent reduction in speed.
A reader wrote that v2.0.1 caused problems with running the Universal version of Halo in single-player mode on his Intel-based Mac mini with Intel graphics:
[The] Halo 2.0.1 updater [c]aused obstructions like trees and rocks to be visually invisible, otherwise they are still there (i.e. they still block shots and cause collisions).
We do not have this problem with our MacBook Pro C2D or iMac C2D but in single-player mode we have a problem with the "tab" key for switching weapons--it usually doesn't.
In summary, if you primarily use the multiplayer mode and have an ATI graphics card, you will probably like this update. If you have a Mac with Nvidia or Intel graphics, you may not like this update for the reasons we've noted.
[Update: We heard from Ken Cobb of Destineer, the main developer of Halo (Universal),who was surprised that version 2.0.1 (and v2.0.2) ran more slowly than v2.0 on our 24" iMac Core 2 Duo with Nvidia GeForce 7600GT graphics. He looked into why and discovered the reason. Our standard Halo test configuration includes enabling 2X Full-Scene AntiAliasing (2X FSAA). It seems that in the initial release of Halo 2.0 (Universal), FSAA was not working on the Nvidia graphics in our 24" iMac Core 2 Duo but it is in v2.0.1 and v2.0.2 giving the appearance of a speed reduction. In fact, if we had tested without 2X FSAA enabled we would have seen a speed improvement between v2.0 and version 2.0.1/2.0.2 similar to that experienced with the ATI graphics.] [Bill Fox]
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