Halo: Campaign Evolved PC Performance Review
CPU and Memory Performance Testing
Is Halo: Campaign Evolved CPU-limited?
When playing Halo: Campaign Evolved on PC, we did not encounter major CPU issues. That said, our testing is limited here. We only have an Intel i9-13900K for game testing, which limits our testing. We can disable cores to simulate lower-end CPUs, though this only gives us a limited look at how games will perform on lower-end CPUs. After all, many older CPUs have less single-threaded performance than Intel’s Raptor Lake lineup.
Our testing is from the opening of Halo’s The Silent Cartographer mission. This scene drops players straight into combat with a decent number of enemies and NPCs. It may not be the most CPU-limited area of the game, but it is a solid testing ground. For CPU testing, we used an Nvidia RTX 5080 GPU and ran Halo Campaign Evolved at 1080p Ultra settings with DLSS set to Low (33% scaling). This ensured that the game was CPU-limited.
Overall, we can see benefits from moving from now-standard 6-core (12-thread) CPUs to higher core/thread counts. Moving to eight cores gives us a notable increase in average framerate, and enabling our CPU’s E-cores delivers further benefits. That said, lower percentile framerates do not change much. Clearly, Halo on Unreal Engine 5 benefits from more CPU cores. That said, the game can still run well on 6-core CPUs. However, note that our 1st percentile framerates are in the 80s/90s. It won’t take much of a drop in single-threaded performance to drop this game below 60 FPS. Older CPU users beware.
Memory Scaling
We tested this game with 32GB of Corsair Vengeance memory running at DDR5-6000 speeds. We ran the same test sequence as above with various memory speeds, and noted that each drop in memory speed resulted in lower performance levels. Clearly. Halo: Campaign Evolved likes fast memory. This makes us wonder if DDR4-based systems will suffer from lower performance, given DDR4’s lesser bandwidth. I also wonder how well the game would run with faster DDR5 memory.
