Quinn Ebert

Greetings,

Finally had some chances of late to slow down just a bit, and relax a little…In-the-process, finally got my hands, albeit a good bit “late”, on a copy of “Halo 2″ for Windows Vista.  However, it seems that, for users (like me) of recent update-versions of Microsoft’s “Games for Windows LIVE” client programme, and owners (again, like me) of NVIDIA Graphics Cards with up-to-date drivers, that there is a BIG issue with the latest NVIDIA drivers causing sluggish (or “stuttery”/stuttering) performace in-the-game.  Well, I think I may have a workaround here — at least, this small set of changes (which you can make in the NVIDIA Control Panel software) seems to resolve these issues in my particular instance of this problem.

NOTE: I’m not going to tell you how to get to your NVIDIA Control Panel interface…There’s several ways to do it, nonetowhich are very complicated — If you’re really desperate, though, you can pay me to walk you through it — Contact me if you REALLY need me to hold your hand on that.  ;-)

Anyway, to get started, let’s bring up the NVIDIA Control Panel to the “Program Settings” Tab of the “Manage 3D Settings” page…See the following screenshot (you can click it to enlarge it, if you need to) if you need to know where it is…  Once you get there, I *highly* recommend you tick the “Show only programs found on this computer” checkbox so that you can much more easily find (and select) the “Halo 2 (startup.exe)” entry from the “Select a program to customize” dropdown menu.

And, in the “Specify the settings for this program” listview box, try setting your settings as-below:

Anisotropic Filtering = Off
Antialiasing - Gamma Correction = Off
Antialiasing - Mode = Override any application setting
Antialiasing - Setting = 2x
Antialiasing - Transparency = Off
Conformant Texture Clamp = Use hardware
Error Reporting = Off
Extension Limit = Off
Force Mipmaps = None
Maximum Pre-rendered Frames = 0 (Numerical Zero)
Multi-Display/Mixed-GPU Acceleration = Multiple-display Performance Mode
Texture Filtering - Anisotropic Sample Optimization = On
Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias = Allow
Texture Filtering - Quality = High performance
Texture Filtering - Trilinear Optimization = On
Threaded Optimization = Auto
Triple Buffering = Off
Vertical Sync = Force off

Now, my personal experience leads me to believe that the two MOST influential settings here are the ones for “Vertical Sync” and “Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames,” but, I’ve been wrong before (and, being a human being, expect that, if I’m wrong here, it wouldn’t be the last time)…  Also, PLEASE NOTE, if one of those settings shown above doesn’t show up for your NVCPL, or if you have other settings available to you, it’s VERY likely you have a newer or older GPU (mine’s an AsusTek 8600 GT) than I do, but, my best guess, again, is with the “Vertical Sync” and “Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames” options.

Also, be sure to “Apply” settings before closing NVCPL, and, be sure to comment on this article with your praise, complaints, or other experiences with this possible workaround.  ;-)

Thank you, and, Enjoy!
–Quinn

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 9:37AM and is filed under What-The-Heck?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.