Halo: Campaign Evolved PC Performance Review
Conclusion
Halo: Campaign Evolved is a solid PC game, though it isn’t without issues
Overall, the PC version of Halo: Campaign Evolved is solid. That said, the game isn’t without issues. For starters, the game’s Film Grain and Chromatic Aberration cannot be disabled without settings mods. These options should be available in-game. After all, not all PC gamers are experienced .ini tweakers. Furthermore, the game’s multi-frame generation cutscene bug should be fixed in-game and not require additional fixes. Once that is fixed, Nvidia DLSS Multi Frame Generation should be added to the game. Frankly, it is embarrassing that this issue is present to begin with. Enabling any form of frame generation (2x) results in cutscenes running at 15 FPS with generated frames. It’s worse if you force higher levels of frame generation.
Overall, Halo: Campaign Evolved runs well on PC if you use suitable hardware. This game isn’t easy to run, and there is a reason why ray tracing-compatible hardware is recommended. This is an Unreal Engine 5.8 title, and it was made with hardware-accelerated ray tracing in mind. It also needs at least 8GB of VRAM to run well (sorry RTX 2060 6GB users).
If you intend to run this game at your native resolution at ultra settings, you may have a hard time. Halo: Campaign Evolved is designed to use resolution upscaling. There’s a reason why DLSS and FSR’s Ultra setting is a 67% resolution scale. Even with an RTX 5080 or Radeon RX 9070 XT, gamers need upscaling to achieve 60+ FPS performance levels at 4K Ultra settings. That said, moving from Ultra to High settings results in significant performance gains with minimal performance downsides. In fact, even this game’s low preset looks good. The only easily noticeable difference between Low and Ultra at first glance is foliage density. Halo Campaign Evolved isn’t a game that looks potato at low settings.
Performance concerns
With graphical settings alone, Halo: Campaign Evolved has limited performance scalability. Gamers will be relying mostly on resolution upscaling for performance gains. While moving from Ultra to high settings results in notable performance gains, low and medium settings deliver much lower performance gains.
Another thing that we noted is that non-GPU-limited performance is impacted by both CPU core counts and memory speed. This could present issues for gamers with older 6-core CPUs with DDR4 memory. Additional optimisation in this area would be welcome. Note that we also found that AMD’s GPUs appear to have much less CPU overhead than Nvidia’s. At 1080p, in a CPU/memory limited area, the game ran much faster on our AMD RX 9070 XT than our Nvidia RTX 5080.
Overall, Halo: Campaign Evolved has a solid PC version. Yes, there is room for improvement, but it runs well with the right settings. With a few fixes, this PC version could move from being solid to being excellent. Halo Studios, make sure you fix things. If nothing else, it will make us much more interested in Halo 2’s new remake.
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