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I've never seen the numbers, but the rumours have generally been that Halo 2's dynamic objects often have lower polycounts than those in Halo 1; that they look more detailed mostly because of using specular reflections (Halo 1 has boatloads of specular on terrain, but none on dynamic objects), allocating texture detail more carefully, and motherfroodlenutzskyingly ridiculous helpings of normal mapping.
Still, I'm not sure how people come to the conclusion that the "Xbox clearly was struggling a bit." That was doubtless absolutely true (or perhaps a colossal understatement) when Halo 2 was still planning to use crazy stuff like stencil shadows, but the release version of the game doesn't seem to scrape all that aggressively at the console's limits. Halo 1 makes it really obvious where the console struggles; for instance, any idiot could realize that the oXbox's fillrate was questionable by noticing that CE goes into slideshow mode when the game gleefully throws fifty bajillion alpha layers at the screen. But Halo 2? Nah, Halo 2 mostly holds a rock-solid 30fps. Maybe it spends a lot of time just barely within 30fps frame timing, but it's not very obvious whether it does or not.