Halo: Combat Evolved sits in a pantheon alongside some of the best games ever made, so it wasn\u2019t surprising that Microsoft would release a second remake of it eventually. However, instead of using a bespoke, in-house engine, this time around Halo Studios opted for Unreal 5,. And while that\u2019s awesome for anyone with a high-end machine, it does mean it struggles to scale to lower-end and older hardware. <\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean the game doesn\u2019t look good though. If you have the hardware to juice up the settings a bit, Halo: Campaign Evolved looks stunning, with excellent lighting and environmental detail. But unlike a lot of games that have come out this year, like Resident Evil Requiem and Crimson Desert, which are on much more flexible engines, the Halo remake isn\u2019t well-optimized for lower-end hardware and turns into an ugly mess once you need to start turning down some of the settings. <\/p>\n
Ever since its debut back in 2022, Unreal 5 has had a bit of a reputation for being quite heavy on graphics cards. And while Halo: Campaign Evolved does fare a bit better than something like Silent Hill F or, well, the Silent Hill 2 remake, there doesn\u2019t seem to be a lot of room to tweak performance, at least in my testing of the game. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve already talked about how bad Halo: Combat Evolved looks on the weakest handhelds, but there generally isn\u2019t much room to tweak without making massive swings. You often have to change multiple settings to see any kind of performance improvement, to the point where you\u2019re probably better off just going to the next preset if you\u2019re looking to boost performance or fidelity. <\/p>\n
So, for most people, the best move is to just look at this handy little chart and align the preset with which graphics card you have and how much VRAM you have. For instance, I plugged in the RTX 3090 as a stand-in for the recommended RTX 3080 Ti, which the chart says should run at 60 fps at 4K with the High preset. And, well, that\u2019s exactly how the 3090 performed. But what\u2019s interesting is that the performance didn\u2019t really move all that much when I started tweaking with the settings. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\nHalo: Campaign Evolved \u2013 First Screenshots<\/h3>\n