A friend owns a gaming store and they get things before they are actually released, I've been helping him configure a server and we loaded halo pc up at my house to connect to him to make sure his firewall, ports, server all that stuff was in good shape... but my 2.6 gigahertz, 512 megs of DDR, 128 meg Geforce fx 5200... runs the game horribley. I mean I know I don't have the best graphics card, but its pretty good and runs everything else I throw at it perfectly. I mean the single player campaign is almost completely unplayable... Turned down all the video options and still same results? It seriously amazes me that this game could require more then what I have just to run it pretty smooth.

i had the fx5200, and my bet thats where the problem lies, cuzz that card blows big time. Worse Framerates ever. Try lowering your resolution as much as you can stand to, dont just change the details

What about the new drivers Nvidia has been talking about that they are developing for half-life2? think once those come out that may give me better performance? It seems doubtful...

Well guess its time to go video card shopping... got about $150-200 to spend... bring on the suggestions.

If I'm getting something new I don't want to get something just a little better then my suck *** Fx 5200

I've renamed the thread and am moving to the Consumer's Opinion forum where you should get at least several suggestions.

I dunno from what i've read and heard from friends, halo is a pig to run

A friend of mine has an overclocked amd athlon 3ghz (overclocked), 512mb ddr ram (the good stuff by corsair), and a ati radeon pro 9700 and he gets slowdown on that machine.

How about the radeaon 9600 256mb ddr ram. pricewatch has they $129-150. But as nimbles says Halo is a pig to run, so I would look around to see what cards have been successful running it.

A Radeon 9600 Pro would be able to run it.

They are almost as fast as anything else, especially with detail turned on, so if that can't, then not much else will.

Halo is not that hard to run my geforce ti 4200 handles it fine with everything maxxed and the res at 1024x768.

And i would deffinatly reccomend Ati card over Nvidia right now.

Actually Halo runs like a dog if you have antialiasing enabled due to the way it is programmed.

So disable it before you play!

PS. The FX5200 is a very low end card. I suggest a Radeon 9600Pro but watch out for the 256mb boards because they use much slower ram and are slower than most 128mb cards!