---
title: 'Halo Campaign Evolved First Look - Xbox/PC/Ally X - OG vs New Game, Performance + More'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=FvTrOI1krJI'
video_id: 'FvTrOI1krJI'
date: 2026-07-28
duration_sec: 955
---

# Halo Campaign Evolved First Look - Xbox/PC/Ally X - OG vs New Game, Performance + More

> Source: [Halo Campaign Evolved First Look - Xbox/PC/Ally X - OG vs New Game, Performance + More](https://youtube.com/watch?v=FvTrOI1krJI)

## Summary

Halo Combat Evolved is being remade as Halo Campaign Evolved, using Unreal Engine 5. The preview covers two missions on PC and Xbox Series X, highlighting visual improvements, gameplay changes, and performance across different hardware.

### Key Points

- **Game Overview** [0:02] — Halo Campaign Evolved is a new remake of the original Halo, using Unreal Engine 5 instead of in-house tech.
- **Demo Missions** [1:23] — Two missions were playable: Silent Cartographer and Assault on the Control Room.
- **Visual Changes** [2:10] — Ultra-detailed terrain affects Warthog driving; water and lighting are significantly improved with Lumen GI and hardware ray tracing.
- **Color and Lighting** [3:48] — Vibrant colors from the original are restored, unlike the Anniversary edition. Lumen provides realistic light bouncing.
- **Gameplay Changes** [5:31] — Level design tweaks allow Warthog access to new areas; item usage now requires selection; new features like vehicle hijacking and energy sword usage are added.
- **Unreal Engine 5 Issues** [8:32] — Temporal noise and denoising problems are present, especially in dark scenes. Ray reconstruction is requested for PC.
- **Xbox Series X Performance** [9:26] — Performance mode targets 60fps and is very stable, using dynamic resolution scaling (50-75% of output) and a translucency pass.
- **PC Performance** [10:52] — High-end PC runs well at 4K max settings; mid-range (RTX 4060) struggles near 60fps due to CPU bottleneck; handheld (ROG Ally X) barely hits 30fps at low settings.

### Conclusion

Halo Campaign Evolved successfully modernizes the original game's visuals while retaining its atmosphere, though Unreal Engine 5 introduces some noise issues. The Xbox Series X version offers a stable 60fps, while PC performance varies widely.

## Transcript

Halo Combat Evolved has returned once
again with the upcoming release of Halo
Campaign Evolved, and I had a chance to
sample two levels from the game on both
PC and Xbox Series X. And as DF's most
passionate Halo fan, I wanted to talk
about it today. You see, at its core,
Campaign Evolved marks another attempt
at remaking one of the world's most
iconic shooters, the original Halo.
While the Xbox 360 Anniversary Edition
offered then modernized assets, I've
always felt that it missed the mark with
a visual overhaul that lacks artistic
cohesion and a flare present in Bungie's
original designs. It also marked the
beginning of 343 Industries Reign of
Halo in conjunction with Saber
Interactive, of course. And aside from
stereoscopic 3D, I really don't care for
it. With Campaign Evolved though, the
development team has been granted a
second shot. You see, while Anniversary
Mark 343's first project, Campaign
Evolved now fills that same role for the
newly christened Halo Studios. Along
with this though, and breaking with Halo
tradition, Halo Studios has dropped its
in-house technology and instead embraced
Unreal Engine 5. And with it, we get
some huge benefits, but also some rather
noticeable sacrifices. So, let's dig in.
The demo version includes two missions,
the Silent Cgrapher and Assault on the
Control Room. Two of the best missions
in the game, I would argue. I started
with Cgrapher and was presented with
this gorgeous, albeit offline rendered
cutscene. I was really hoping for
real-time cutscenes like the original,
but alas, they've gone with video. Once
you're handed control, though, I was
immediately impressed with the vision on
display. It represents a visually
striking evolution of the Halo aesthetic
that feels both true to Bungie's
original vision, but also light years
ahead of Halo Anniversary. I ended up
doing laps around the island in a
Warthog to compare the versions. And
yeah, I really like what they've done
here, but it also highlights how these
visuals can change the experience a
little bit. The shift to ultradetailed
rocky terrain means that your driving
experience is a lot rougher than before.
I mean, in the original Halo, these are
just big flat open spaces with tiled
textures, right? But in the new one,
it's all much more detailed, and the
Warthog now needs to physically react to
it. Still, more detail doesn't always
mean better, as we saw with Anniversary.
But this time, I feel like all that
extra detail actually manages to retain
the atmosphere that this specific island
has always been known for. It's
different, but visually intriguing.
Some other visual details I liked. The
water system for instance is absolutely
gorgeous. The waves lapping up on the
beach as reflections of the surroundings
dance across the surface. Just gorgeous.
The Warthog of course actually reacts to
it as well. A far cry from the original.
Lighting is another important
difference. Leveraging Lumen GI and on
interior lights, Unreal Engine 5's mega
lights feature, Halo presents beautiful
dramatic sunlight and pyrochnic effects.
The bounce of the afternoon sun off the
warm sand creates some truly dramatic
scenarios. Couple that with voluometrics
and tons of dust effects, and it all
just looks really cohesive. What's cool
here is that even on Xbox, they're
actually using hardware ray tracing even
in performance mode. So, they sidestep a
lot of the issues that we see with
SDF-based tracing. In addition, as I
mentioned, mega lights are actually used
for interior and local lights, something
you'll really appreciate when you're
surrounded by tons of Covenant all
blasting their brightly colored weapons.
And in fact, color is one of the key
things they really got right here. The
original Halo was known for its super
vibrant greens, blues, purples, and the
like, right? That's what defined the
look of the Covenant. And it's something
that was completely missed for
anniversary. This time it looks
excellent, and it really makes these
interior scenes feel super dynamic with
lights and blasters going all over the
place. Here's another example I really
liked. In the original game, in this
hallway beneath the island, it looks
like this. There's a little bit of light
pouring in at the end of the tunnel, but
it's otherwise pretty dark. When they
did the anniversary edition, it instead
looked like this. It's super bright and
garish. Honestly, I don't like this at
all. For Campaign Involved, however, we
actually see the effects of lumen with
light pouring in through the door and
then actually bouncing around the
hallway, very subtly illuminating it. I
think it looks absolutely beautiful
here. And you get this effect on every
version. And of course, all of this
lighting detail greatly benefits the
massive increase in object detail. Aside
from the terrain and structures, things
like, say, the Warthog, your fellow
Marines, and the like are all lovingly
rendered with an obscene amount of
granular detail beyond anything we've
seen in the series past. It feels like
two generations beyond something like,
say, Halo Infinite.
Of course, there is a lot more to
discuss here, but I want to save some
things for the final game. The point
here though is that they have managed to
nail the art design in a way that I
really like and it looks so much better
than Anniversary. So, while we're
talking about differences between the
original and this new version, there are
some things that really stood out to me
that impact gameplay. For instance, at
one point you need to make your way into
the center of the island, and you go up
through this area behind a tree, after
which you make your way up towards the
center section where there's a pair of
hunters waiting for you. In the
original, you could finagle the wthog
into this space. Clearly, the tree was
meant to block you, but if you played
around enough, you could actually get it
up there. But in the campaign evolved
version, that tree is not there, and you
can just drive the warthog straight up
to the top. And if you want, you can
even take it down into this structure
right up to the switch. So this battle
inside the room then becomes trivial
since you can blast around in the
Warthog. In the original, if you were
able to get the Warthog up here, you
could take it down into this area, but
these covenant structures did not have
physics applied to them. So the Warthog
would get stuck here. You couldn't take
it further. I also noticed a difference
in item usage. So, in the original, if
you landed on an overshield, you would
be invincible for a second. And this was
actually something I used a lot in
multiplayer. But in the new version,
items are something you collect. So,
when you get the overshield, you
actually have to select it and use it
with the item usage key. There isn't
multiplayer in this, I guess, so it
doesn't really matter, but it is an
interesting change. They also brought
forward some of the features that were
introduced in Halo 2 and beyond. For
instance, you can now use the energy
sword that is dropped with certain
elites. You can hijack enemy vehicles
just like Halo 2, which was a huge
feature for that game. The Warthog now
has its horn, which again introduced in
Halo 2. And things like enemy damage
values have been changed significantly.
Hunters, for instance, went down a lot
faster in the original version if you
got in behind them and took out their
weak spot. But here it takes way more
ammunition even on the lowest difficulty
setting, which is interesting. They also
made tweaks and changes to the level
design itself. So in Assault on the
control room, those sort of like bendy
hallways that were used to hide loading
have been completely stripped out and
now they're just straight short hallways
into the next room. The rooms themselves
have also been redesigned in many
instances, likely to make them less
repetitive, which was a major complaint
for this level. As an aside, I did
notice some weird graphical oddities in
this demo. Like, what is this shadow
here on his hand? I don't get it.
Doesn't really correspond to anything.
The registration email also mentioned
that there's issues with foliage popping
on sandy surfaces such as here on the
silent ctographer. So, the severe popin
you see should hopefully not be in the
final game. And while we're here in
Assault in the Control Room, this is how
it stacks up to the original game. And
yeah, it's pretty different, but I
really like the way it looks now, at
least overall. I don't especially love
the way the snow collects here on this
surface here when you're outside. It
kind of gives the metal this sort of
noisy, dithered look reminiscent of poor
ray traced denoising, which brings us to
our next major fault. And this ties
directly into Unreal Engine 5
specifically. The game does not
effectively dn noiseise the image.
There's so much sparkling, boiling, and
temporal noise as you move through the
world, especially in darker scenes.
Compared to the RTGI and something like
IDTech in Doom: The Dark Ages, Unreal
Engine 5 really struggles to keep things
coherent, and you certainly feel it
here. Even on a high-end PC with maximum
possible settings, it's a problem and
something a lot of folks will notice. I
would at least like to see Ray
Reconstruction as an option for the PC
version. And speaking of versions, as
noted, this demo was playable for Xbox
Series X and PC. Series S is technically
playable, but we were told it wasn't
ready yet, so we can't feature it here.
Series X, though runs pretty darn well.
There's both performance and quality
options. Uh, and we can only show
performance mode for this video, but
that one targets 60 frames per second.
And the good news is it really hits it.
It's very, very stable. Impressively so,
considering this uses hardware ray
tracing and all the advanced features of
Unreal Engine. Now, to reach this, the
game deploys two levels of dynamic
resolution scaling, which average around
50 to 75% of the output resolution,
which means you're often at 1080pish,
but it does look pretty clean. The thing
that they did on top of this though is
that there's a translucency pass, which
varies the resolution of transparent
effects based on frame budget. So things
like explosions for instance, you might
observe them becoming rather chunky and
low res in a way that kind of reminded
me of something like Killzone 2
actually, but that's not a bad thing. It
still looks excellent and it's a good
way to save on performance without
lowering the overall resolution to
maintain 60fps.
So clearly Halo Studios has a real
handle on Unreal Engine 5 in terms of
performance, which is great. But we also
sampled the PC version on a range of
hardware to better understand what we're
looking at as we approach launch. To
that end, we sampled it on a high-end
PC, a mid-range system, and a lower-end
handheld.
So, as you'd expect, it runs very well
on a high-end 5090 equipped PC. No
surprise there. I actually had to
capture at 60 fps for YouTube, of
course. And that provided enough
headroom to play with DAA enabled at 4K
with maximum settings without an issue.
You can see up here that the GPU
utilization remains around 50% when
playing with a 60fps cap. Now, playing
above 60 fps definitely increases the
requirements, but it is possible, and
yes, frame generation is available,
though there's a bug in this version
that prevents it from working when using
the Xbox store version, but that should
be fixed for launch, I'd assume. It's
also worth noting that Halo supports
proper ultrawide. Not only does the game
take full advantage of the increased
FOV, but even the pre-rendered cutscenes
actually fill the screen correctly
rather than playing within a small box
in the center of the screen. So, hats
off to Halo Studios for actually
handling ultrawide correctly. But what's
more useful for our viewers, I would
imagine, are the mid-range and handheld
tests. So, on the mid-range side, we
tested using a Ryzen 5 5600X with an RTX
4060 GPU along with 16 GB of 3200 MHz
memory. We used the high preset with
DLSS balance mode while targeting 1440p.
The result, as you can see, is rather
interesting. We largely were only able
to achieve frame rates just shy of 60
frames per second. It's smooth with VRR,
but locking to 60 was a challenge. The
main issue here seems to stem from a CPU
bottleneck, which really drags down
performance. Of course, we'll have to
wait for the final game to pass
judgment, but this does give us an idea
of how it's currently running. And yeah,
it is a heavy game. Assault on the
Control Room, by the way, does actually
run faster on the same machine. Then
there's the ROG Alli X, a more powerful
system than something like a Steam Deck
as you know, but UE5 games are rather
heavy and the results bear this out. We
had to run the game using the lowest
possible settings with low TSR while
targeting 1080p output, which actually
looks pretty okay on the system's
internal screen. But of course, without
a frame rate cap engaged, you can see
that it's just barely clearing 30 FPS
most of the time, which makes it largely
suitable for a 30fps lock if you choose
to do so. But hey, 30fps is the original
Halo Target, so it's certainly playable.
But I suspect something like say the
Steam Deck, which is a less powerful
system of course, will not be able to
provide a decent experience at all. But
we'll test that when we get final code.
So, my current takeaway here is that the
Xbox Series X version is really well
done. Despite the shift to Unreal Engine
and using hardware lumen, they've
managed to hit a very stable 60 frames
per second. Image quality does take a
hit, but it's really not that bad
compared to some other Unreal Engine 5
games. The PC version, however, seems
like it will be moderately heavy, mainly
due to CPU limitations. And
unfortunately, the options menu is also
rather sparse with just the basic things
available to tweak. But obviously, we're
just scratching the surface here, and
there's a whole lot more that we don't
know. Not to mention things I'd like to
talk about in the future, such as the
game's audio, which has a few issues.
Still, as far as previews go, my
impressions are largely positive here.
As someone that never liked the
anniversary graphics for Halo 1, the
results for campaign involved are a lot
better now. Of course, I recognize not
everyone is going to love this new
visual design, right? We always saw this
with Bluepoints games such as the Demon
Souls remake, which I also love, by the
way. But it's not like this will prevent
the original Halo from existing. You can
still play it in the Master Chief
Collection or on original Xbox hardware.
For newcomers and old heads that just
want a fresh take on Halo, I really
think this will be an interesting
release. I also hope that it helps Halo
Studios really understand what worked
about the storytelling, lore, and
atmosphere of Halo before 343 took over.
They always figured out the gameplay.
Halo Infinite plays like a dream, but
it's everything around it that fell
short in my opinion. This feels like a
get back to basics kind of release.
Plus, there's some cool new features in
this version, such as additional skulls,
new missions, and the option to remix
existing missions. Something I did
sample in the demo. Like here, you can
drop enemies and weapons into the silent
cgrapher that had no business being
here. The flood on Cgrapher, sure, why
not? Ultimately, as a longtime fan of
Halo, I'm just happy to be excited about
something Halo again, and I hope this
marks the beginning of something great
for the series. Until the final though,
this is John signing off.