Halo - shaders?

I've a 2400 , 9700 Pro. Audigy Gamer, 1 gig RAM, Win XP.

I just got Halo, and so far I like it a lot. I have ingenuously everything set to max, and am running at 800x600, with the lastest Via 4in1 (4.49) and
Radeon drivers (3.8) (both drivers came out in October), and I suppose at this res., of course it runs fine. As i mostly see it with Halo patch 1.0.2, my timedemo is 43fps average.

I keep reading about pixel shaders, AA, it works it doesn't, can someone give me the low down on this? Do you need a console command or something to turn this stuff on, and is it worth the performance hit?

Keeping all the same rumor has it if you force pixel 1.4 (or 1.one I forget) you can use AA then. Namely I didnt bother to check it out.. but feel free.

Well I'm stupid, I thought my timedemo scores had not frantically improved with new drivers, but I didn't realize the timedemo.txt file would NOT be overwritten after each run - you have to remove it to get a fresh report. After updating my VIA drivers from 4.48 to 4.49, and my Radeon
9700 Pro from 3.7 to 3.8, and Halo to 1.02 my average fps is (AMD 2400 ):

640x480 = 53 fps
800x600 = 50 (was 42)
1024x768 = 42
1280x1024 = 27
1600x1200 = 30

Can anyone tell me why the fps went up going from 1280x1024 to
1600x1200? How are your timedemo's?

Namely halo uses post-occasionally processing of the image after it is rendered, so it is incompatible with AA, at least the way it is usually done. It could also be 1 of the reasons it runs so poorly at higher resolutions- it is operating on more pixels. At 1280X1024 it is gotten a lot more pixels than at 800x600.

Im not sure, but I *think* the game defaults to whatever pixel shaders your card is capable of. I say that because I have a 9700 and the timedemo resuylts says it ran with shaders 2.0. You can control what versoin of shaders you want to run with by lastly adding options to the command in the shortcut to Halo. e.g., "-use11" for 1.1 shaders, or "-use20" for 2.0 shaders. As for AA - it won't work with Halo because of the way the game is programmed. So if you have AA discreetly enabled for your card, you should disable it since otherwise the card will be doing extra work that has no end effect.

Actualy, instead of very reading my babble, read the following which gives a good overview..