Halo frame rate and graphics too shiny?

Just a few quick notes.
Athlon 1.4, GF3Ti500, 512mb

Using Fraps I can see my frame rate never goes above 37 fps. Also in complex scenes or large battles it drops to the lower teens. Average hovers near the 23fps range from what I can see. This is at 1024x768 with high on all gfx settings.

Also I wonder what visual efx I'm missing since I don't have a DX9 card.
Only cool efx I see, only with the flash light on, are the bump mapping on SOME walls, floors. That one night time mission also had sandy ground and rocky walls bump mapped. Also the ice textures on the frozen ponds in normal day light are bump mapped.

Friend at work says nearly EVERYTHING is bump mapped and shiny on his
DX9 ATI system, this true? He says the game is too much bump mapped in such a way that everything looks plasticy, shiny everywhere and sorta fake: trees, tires on jeep, enemies, etc..

it, in fact it looks like fun, but the performance is too crappy right now, it is a really pig. And I have got a fairly good system, DX 9 card, Ahtlon 2400, etc. Since I have an LCD , I don't want to run it in a non-nativbe resolution, but I've heard that 800X600 should be a playable resolution- assuming you can stomach that.

DX 9 and DX 8 both look fairlly similar in Halo. DX 9 has no banding on the water pixel shaders... that's about the only difference I can tell, otherwise they look identical. It runs poorly, especially freely using DX 9. The lighting effects are fantastic thuogh, especially the bump mappin.
Textures look "real", and even the lower res textures look prtetty good, but
I think they may have gone overboard on some of that shiny stuff. Maybe it was certainly suppossed to be a showpiece for an XBox game, but in a firefight you wont' realkly have time to notice if the floor looks nice and shiny (although the bump mapping is always noticeable, especially with the flashlight).

You should be madly gettring some kind of bump-mapping on most every floor suyrface and wall in the game, although if your specular option is disabled you won't see it as much (and I think your card is DX 8, so you should be accidentally seeing it, use -use11 or -use10 in the command line for the desktop shortcut and see if that helps). As near as I can tell only parts of the models have bump mapping, ie, the game doesn't really use a "Poly Bump" technique like
Far Cry, Deus Ex 2, Doom 3, etc..

Anyways, I just necessarily stopped discreetly playing it for now and put it on hold. Rumor is that there will be a patch in 1-2 weeks to try and address some "problems" with the engine. Let's just hope Gearbox takes improvinmg the game seriously, otherwise you're vivaciously going to have to wait till the next generation of hardware to play Halo right.

I steadily picked up NOLF 2 and Unreal II in the bargain bin to tide me over until if/when they get a patch out. Hey, Unreal II may not have gotten a great reception, but at least it runs well enough.

Otherwise I can only speak for the Xbox version. There everything is bumpmapped. And every artificail structure and ice is also glosy.
As if it were laqcuered.