Halo is a sci-fi shooter that takes place on a mysterious alien ring-world. Packed with combat, Halo will have you battling on foot, and in vehicles, inside and outdoors with Alien and Human weaponry. Your objective: to uncover Halo’s horrible secrets and destroy mankind’s sworn enemy, the Covenant.

The game supports the latest shader technology of pixel shaders 2.0. Of course the graphics are somewhat better on PC than Xbox, since most of the game's shader effects have been redesigned to support the latest 2.0 shaders in DX9. Having in mind that there are few games supporting 2.0 pixel shaders, Halo is a good test for VGA cards performance on the shader technology.

A prominent disadvantage of the game is its lack of Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering support. If you get the funny idea to enable these settings via the control panel of your card, you will experience no difference in graphics quality as well as a slow down and loss in performance.

Halo also supports pixel shaders 1.1 that offer better performance at a cost in quality.

- Halo Benchmark

For the Halo benchmark I set the default settings with pixel shaders 2.0 at the following resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and the awesome 1600x1200. The -timedemo command was used to run the default benchmark.

In Halo too, the CPU limitation issue appears again.With a CPU at 3.2 GHz, I believe the fps of the 6800 Ultra might reach 100 fps, having in mind that Nvidia's GPUs are made for performing better on shaders.