Halo Reach PC Performance Review with AMD Ryzen APU Testing

Performance Scaling – Performance, Original and Enhanced

Halo: Reach’s graphical settings are a strange beast, likely due to the fact that Bungie didn’t design this game with PC in mind. LODs are cut back in performance mode and extended in Enhanced mode, it’s that simple, and as a result, the performance impact changes on an area-by-area and a GPU-by-GPU basis.

Below we can see that these presets do to our PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 Red Devil graphics card, where we can see a notable boost in 99th percentile framerates when using the game’s Original settings over High, but a much lower increase when using the game’s Performance mode. 

Our recommendation is to lock Halo: Reach’s maximum framerate at 60FPS, as this prevents framerate instability and game instability. We have run into animation issues, stutters and strange glitches when the framerate is unlocked, making 60FPS the best way to play Halo: Reach at the time of writing. 

Another thing to note is that Halo Reach appeared to offer reduced input lag when locked to 60FPS, though this is based on our experience with the game and not formal testing. The game felt more responsive at 60FPS than it did when the game was sitting at 120-140FPS unlocked.