For some reason my display settings dialog in Halo will not let me turn on shadows or specular lighting, they are just greyed out.

I have a radeon all in wonder , which could well be the problem as that card has tons of compatibility issues.

Anyone else have this problem?

I'm having 1 main problem with Halo. Yes the game seems to be a bit of a hog in terms of horsepower (which a cannot explain, given the somewhat dated graphics - perhaps poor coding?)

However, thats not the problem. I have just about everything set to medium or low. Almost every time I have been playing MP online my CPU has seized, screen freezes, then I have to restart.

I have updated all of my drivers with the exception of my graphics card (as the latest drivers messed everything up beyond belief).

Anyway here are my specs, perhaps someone can make a suggestion?

AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Abit MB
768MB DDR 2100 RAM
2 7200RPM 80GB HDs (Maxtor DiamondMax Plus Western Digital)
SoundBlaster Audigy Gamer
ATI Radeon 8500 128DDR
and a load of fans!
Oh yeah running Windows XP Professional (with latest service packs)

PS - I haven't had anny other problems lately with some of the newer games. I.e. C&C Generals, Black Hawk Down, Dungeon Seige, Freelancer, MOH, Neverwinter Nights, Q3, RTCW, UT2003, Unreal2, Warcraft 3...etc, etc.

Well, this isnt really what I was asking for, Im sure tons of people are having performance issues with it, its even slated in the reviews that its a hog.

Im looking for someone else that cant enable the shadows/specular.
Ive tried everything, its always greyed out.
Im assuming I must be standing alone here, cuz after 75 ppl have viewed this thread, nobody has had the same issue apparently.

As far as your concerned, your system seems more then adequate to run it.
If its crashing it could be a million different things.
Maybe youll get lucky and its a compatibility issue the company will address.

I know when Tron 2.0 came out, I couldnt run it on my sys. at more then about 5 fps, at the lowest rez, with NO effects.
Everyone was telling me my pc must suck, well turns out it was a coding issue with my video card and the game, cuz when the Tron update came out, it jetted me right to perfect performance with all settings enabled.

I have a Radeon Card as well, so it could well be that it has problems with the game.
Im running it will all settings enabled@1024X768 flawlessly, but like I said, I have no shadow/specular, so that could easily be why its running so smoothly.
P4@2.6
512 of 2700
Radeaon 7500 - 64m

Sorry for taking away from your original post. On a more related note I do have the option to enable shadow/specular (which I will turn off and test). However my "Decals" option was greyed out. Like your self I do not know why?

It does suck to have to play a highly anticipated game without these nice graphical touches due (most likely) to a coding issue. Perhaps this one was just rushed out the door? Two years can go by pretty quickly if you're not paying attention.

Good luck!

Tried it without shadow/specular, same thing. Following that I attempted to download the latest Catalyst driver for the Radeon series. Although this time I only downloaded the device driver Vs the entire package. It seems as though it worked OK? I haven't tested it yet (to my satisfaction). The interesting thing for you "Noct" is that after I downloaded the latest driver, the Decals option was no longer greyed out. That being said, I can only speculate that it's also a driver issue for you. Not sure, but I hope this helps.

Cheers

Just FYI, I tried it with the latest drivers and presto! Same ****in' thing! Back to the old drawing board. Me thinks, we're going to have to wait for the Bungie programmers to create a new patch.

Yeah, I already tried re-installing the new catalyst myself, nada.
My decals work fine, i just cant enable the other two.
Im betting itll work when the next patch hits.

OK, this is kinda weird - but I won't complain. I've adjusted some of the settings in the game itself and now (it appears as though) I have better results (only crashed 1 out of 3 times Vs every time).

turned up the resolution from 800X600 to 1024X768, bumped-up the refresh rate from 60-75Hz, turned on specular & shadows (they were off before), decals off particles from low to high and texture quality from medium to high. Now the game looks better, runs smoother and I have less lag & crashing?!?

WTF?