Halo Campaign Evolved PC Review + Optimized Settings – Great Game, But There Are Issues

[00:04] release for Halo Studios. It's the team's first game built on Unreal Engine 5 and a complete remake of the campaign that started it all. As John noted in our recent review, the result is an impressive reimagining that manages to

[00:18] modernize the game while remaining remarkably faithful to Bungie's original vision. But what about the PC version? Um, we already got an early look at it during the preview period last month where some concerns emerged around image

[00:34] quality and perhaps more importantly CPU performance. With the final game now in hand, we've taken a much closer look at how the PC version actually holds up. there are still some areas where Campaign Evolved could have used a

[00:50] we go any further, a big thanks to Alienware for sponsoring our PC performance reviews. And with all of our high-end testing, we'll be using the high-end testing, we'll be using the firm's newly revised Alienware Area 51.

[01:04] Yes, the flagship gaming PC has received a full refresh with a refined focus on highquality design paired with high-end cooling, taking care of the best gaming silicon on the market. In addition to supporting high-end RTX 5000 GPUs up to

[01:19] the RTX5090, the new Area 51 also supports AMD's top-of-the-line Ryzen 9000 processors. From the brilliant Ryzen 7 9800 X3D From the brilliant Ryzen 7 9800 X3D through to the latest Ryzen 9 9950 X3D2.

[01:34] through to the latest Ryzen 9 9950 X3D2. In our tests, Ryzen 9000 X3D processors offer up by far the best CPU gaming performance available. A key recommendation for a high-spec gaming PC. Keeping thermals in check is the new

[01:47] gasket architecture, using a combination of 180 and 140 mm fans to create positive pressure, moving 25% more air while being 45% quieter than prior Area

[01:59] 51 generations. There's a 1500 W platinum power supply and more than enough thermal headroom to handle the extreme demands of the RTX5090 extreme demands of the RTX5090 which pulls 600 W just by itself. Put

[02:13] simply, the new Area 51 is built for the absolute limit of modern PC gaming. The perfect hardware for testing the high-end PC experience in our performance reviews. Check out the link in the video description below to find

[02:25] out more. So, let's get straight into it. Starting with the settings menus. fairly sparse. And one emission that's particularly frustrating is the lack of individual toggles for chromatic aberration and film grain. Neither can

[02:39] be disabled through the in-game menu, even by dropping post-processing quality to low. There is a workaround that not only lets us disable both effects, but gives us access to quite a few other useful tweaks as well, and we'll get to

[02:52] though, post-processing effects, chromatic aberration, and film grain in particular. There's a lot of people out there who'd really like the option to turn them off, and not having that option here, that's not good. Moving on,

[03:07] the initial shader compilation took uh nearly 4 minutes on the Ryzen 5 5600, done, you're straight into the game, and for the most part, the compilation process seems to have done its job. That said, you'll still encounter the

[03:22] the one you can see here. More concerning though is CPU performance. The Ryzen 5 5600 struggles to maintain 60 frames pers during heavier combat with performance frequently dropping

[03:36] into the 50s and even dipping into the 40s in the most demanding encounters. That's especially surprising when you look at the same sections of gameplay running on Xbox Series X, which maintains its 60fps target throughout

[03:50] maintains its 60fps target throughout the same areas despite having a weaker Zen 2 class CPU cluster. There's also a repeatable traversal hitch in this section, for example, that persists even on the all powerful Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

[04:06] It occurs with warm shaders, too, producing a frame time spike of nearly 70 milliseconds. So, we're seemingly looking at another case of the traversal stutter issues we've seen all too often in Unreal Engine 5 titles. Xbox Series

[04:21] X, meanwhile, doesn't appear to exhibit the same hitch. Again, this isn't typical behavior, and we'd hope to see it fixed. When it comes to GPU room for optimization. So, let's dig into the setting selection in more

[04:35] depth, and we're going to be kicking off with global illumination quality, where there's a useful performance win on offer with surprisingly little visual compromise. Ultra produces slightly stronger light bounce in some scenes,

[04:49] but the difference is extremely subtle, really only becoming apparent when flicking back and forth between ultra and high. Dropping to high improves performance by about 8%. While going any lower offers essentially no further

[05:01] performance gains, making high the default recommendation here. Let's move on to lighting quality next, which primarily affects shadow quality based on our observations. Oddly enough, performance here varies significantly

[05:14] depending on the scene. In this darker indoor area, ultra through medium perform almost identically, but dropping to low gives us a healthier 8% performance win. Outdoors, the scaling is a little more gradual. High is around

[05:28] 4% faster than ultra, while dropping all the way down to low extends that advantage to roughly 9%. Low is also our closest match for Series X's performance mode here, while the quality mode matches high. Now, there is a catch with

[05:42] those lower settings. Going back to the indoor scene, medium and low exhibit considerably more temporal noise and boiling artifacts around certain light sources, particularly across reflective surfaces like the Wartthog here. Ultra

[05:57] entirely, but they do reduce them significantly. Interestingly, the choice of upscaler can make quite a difference. DLSS tends to exacerbate the noise, particularly at medium and low, whereas TSR handles it considerably better at

[06:13] the same internal resolution. Series X exhibits the same underlying artifact in its performance mode, but its use of TSR keeps it better controlled, and switching to TSR on PC produces a very similar result. So for DLSS users, we'd

[06:28] recommend high for the cleaner presentation. low remains a worthwhile option if you're looking to claw back some extra performance, but we'd recommend pairing it with TSR in that case, which does a slightly better job

[06:40] of keeping the noise issue under control. The next big performance win comes from reflections. Campaign Evolved uses hardware accelerated lumen reflections, and lowering this setting introduces a more aggressive roughness

[06:55] with reflections disappearing from rougher surfaces. In terms of performance, dropping from ultra to high improves performance by around 17%, while medium and low offer very little extra beyond that. Visually, medium

[07:09] recommendation, and it's also the closest match for Xbox Series X's quality mode. Interestingly though, the Xbox conso's performance mode appears to use a custom reflection configuration, possibly lower than PC's low setting, as

[07:24] none of the available options seem to match it. There's another easy performance win by adjusting atmospheric quality, which controls effects such as clouds, fog, and the sky. Ultra through medium perform essentially identically

[07:37] here, while dropping to low gives us a useful 7% performance uplift with relatively little visual compromise. Low is also our match for Xbox Series X's performance mode, and that makes it our recommendation. While the quality mode

[07:52] appears to use either medium or high, the two look similar enough that it's difficult to determine which it is. Moving on then, geometric quality offers very little in the way of performance gains on PC. So, medium is our

[08:05] recommendation here. What makes this setting worth looking at though is how Xbox Series X scales it. Performance mode uses a custom configuration. Nearby foliage matches PC's medium setting, but distant trees use visibly simplified

[08:20] geometry that isn't available as an option through any of the PC presets. On PC, those trees retain essentially the same quality across the range with lower settings instead culling some of them entirely. Xbox Series X's quality mode,

[08:35] meanwhile, is a straightforward match for PC's high. And lastly, coming back to those missing chromatic aberration and film grain controls we mentioned earlier, there's a useful tool out there called Ultra Plus Manager, which makes

[08:48] straightforward. Once installed, detected. And Ultra Plus essentially gives you an all-in-one interface for a whole range of Unreal Engine tweaks that

[09:00] you'd otherwise have to apply manually through config files. There's quite a lot you can play around with here, but for our purposes, we can start by individually disabling chromatic aberration and film grain. And here's

[09:12] the result with both effects removed for a noticeably cleaner presentation. More interestingly, it also gives us an easy way to address another problem we've noticed throughout Campaign Evolved, the considerable amount of sparkling,

[09:26] boiling, and temporal noise, particularly from lumen reflections. You can see that quite clearly here when switching weapons as Chief's hand moves across the reflective surface. It leaves behind a trail of noisy artifacts which

[09:41] then take a moment to resolve. The Ultra Plus tool allows us to replace the game's default dinoiser with Nvidia's ray reconstruction. And the improvement here is dramatic. The reflection noise during that same movement is

[09:55] substantially cleaned up, producing a much more temporarily stable image. There is a notable performance cost though. At native 4K with DLAA on an RTX 5090, ray reconstruction will reduce performance by around 25% compared to

[10:11] ultra reflections with the default deninoiser. At more sensible resolutions and DLSS settings, this becomes more manageable, but you'll still need some GPU headroom. For 60 fps gameplay with RA reconstruction enabled at 1440p using

[10:25] DLSS balance mode, you're looking at something around a 4070Ti super or thereabouts in order to maintain decent performance. That's pretty big. There are some image quality trade-offs as well. While ray

[10:40] reconstruction does a much better job cleaning up the reflection noise, there is some ghosting on moving particles when the camera is stationary, which isn't present with the game's default deninoiser. More importantly, ray

[10:52] reconstruction only seems to work correctly with reflections set to ultra. Drop below ultra and the reflections become extremely noisy, almost as if denoising has been disabled entirely. So ultra reflections, well, they're

[11:06] basically a requirement here. With those caveats, this isn't something we'd recommend universally. Medium reflections remains our general recommendation for its sizable performance win. But if the reflection

[11:18] noise bothers you and you have the GPU horsepower available, ultra reflections with ray reconstruction produces a considerably cleaner and more stable image. So, with all of that testing out of the way, here are our final optimized

[11:33] settings selections alongside our approximate console equivalent settings. Bearing in mind that there are some custom tweaks for consoles, we've made targeted reductions across a number of settings here, focusing on the ones that

[11:47] give us the most worthwhile performance gains without significantly compromising visual quality. And the end result is pretty decent. On the Ryzen 5 5600 test pretty decent. On the Ryzen 5 5600 test system at 1440p with TSR set to 70%, we

[12:02] move from 56 FPS at Altford to 70 FPS with our optimized settings. That's a healthy 25 percentage point performance gain in this scene. Though it has to be said that improvements can be more modest elsewhere. It's all dependent on

[12:16] content. Okay then. So, let's try to wrap everything up here after all of that. Um, campaign evolved. It's an impressive release, but the PC version doesn't quite live up to the quality of the remastering or remaking work itself.

[12:29] There's a solid enough foundation here and with the right settings, it runs reasonably well on the GPU side. But there are issues. Limited scalability, persistent CPU bottlenecks, traversal hitching, and some questionable image

[12:45] quality decisions. All of this prevent this from being the PC release we'd really hoped for. The CPU performance is the biggest concern. Seeing a Ryzen 5 5600 regularly fall below 60 frames pers in situations where Series X maintains

[13:01] in situations where Series X maintains its target frame rate. That's not good. Suggests there's meaningful optimization work still to be done on PC. And given that we identified the same problem during the preview, it's disappointing

[13:14] to see that carry through to release. It's a bit of a puzzle bearing in mind that the 5600 comprehensively outperforms the Zen 2 architecture found frustrating emissions on the image quality side where Halo Studios really

[13:29] should have given the users more control. The Ultra+ toolkit gives PC players a useful way to work around some of them including the missing post-processing controls and that all important Nvidia ray reconstruction

[13:43] option. But, you know, these are ultimately options and improvements that should have been properly exposed and supported by the game itself. None of this takes away from what Halo Studios has achieved with the remake itself. And

[13:55] hopefully the PC specific issues we've highlighted here can be addressed in post-launch updates, bringing the PC version up to the standard this remake deserves. Um, but with that, we've reached the end of this video. So, the

[14:08] usual stuff applies. But before I get on to that, a big thanks to Rayanne for putting in the hard work in uh putting these optimized settings together. Anyway, that's it. So, please do like, subscribe, share, ring bells, that kind

[14:20] the DF supporter program, patreon.com/digitalfoundry. for watching and supporting Digital Foundry.