For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait, since it was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a few years back. No additional patches or tweaks are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox has included all of the necessary information in their README file. The Halo benchmark runs through four of the cut-scenes from the game, after which the average frame rate is recorded. We patched the game using the latest v1.04 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024. Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with Halo at the moment, so all of the test below were run with anti-aliasing disabled.
After the relative closeness of the Final Fantasy Benchmark, we were a bit surprised to see the Sapphire X800 Pro slip as far behind not only the 6800 GT, but the vanilla 6800 as well. Sapphire's card came in a full nine frames behind the GeForce 6800, almost a 17% difference between the two cards. It did manage to outperfrom the 5950 Ultra however, by 6 frames, or 13%. The tables turned slightly into the X800 Pro's favor at 1280x1024. As before, the GeForce 6800 GT simply dominated the competition, but this time it was the X800 Pro nudging out the GeForce 6800, with the 5950 Ultra bringing up the rear.