Xbox Game Studios / 343 Industries
Ars Technica will eventually go hands-on with Halo Infinite‘s campaign on PC, but as I noted in my feature-length review, our repeated requests to test the game on PC were declined.
So ahead of the version’s Wednesday launch, we’re left sifting through reports from the few outlets that were deemed worthy of getting a PC-specific look at the Infinite campaign. The most comprehensive analysis thus far, delivered by Digital Foundry PC gaming legend Alex Battaglia, ends with a pretty strong judgment.
“I will not be playing to beat the campaign to completion until a number of issues I mentioned are sorted out, as I really want to have a super-smooth Halo experience that the current game does not always offer,” Battaglia says.
See for yourself (kind of)
Head to Steam or the Windows Store right now, and you can download the free-to-play competitive multiplayer version of Halo Infinite. If you do, you’ll find a pretty robust settings menu that includes the all-important toggles for visual settings, along with sliders for both your field of view and your monitor’s aspect ratio.
The best news ahead of the campaign’s launch is that the PC ultrawide monitor ratios—which can reach extremes like 32:9, compared to the HDTV standard of 16:9—seem to be working well in the versus modes, which focus primarily on first-person combat, along with brief cinematic camera pulls before and after a match.
The Infinite campaign will arguably put more of an emphasis on arbitrary monitor ratios, as it includes a lot of cut scenes. These scenes also play with Master Chief’s perspective in clever ways, as they move from his in-helmet view to third-person perspectives at a moment’s notice. Previous promotional footage for Infinite confirmed that the game’s PC development team has focused on making sure those cut scenes work with ultrawide monitor ratios. So far, though, we haven’t seen anyone test these perspective-shifting cut scenes, nor Infinite‘s ambitious open-world environment, on screens beyond the 16:9 standard.
Not feeling so dynamic
Xbox Game Studios
Battaglia also says there are a few curious issues with the PC build’s performance that aren’t found in the console versions. The biggest problem is a constant “frame time” bump when the game’s dynamic resolution scaling (DRS) system is enabled.
Infinite can strain an average gaming PC’s CPU, even when the game is running at a 720p resolution and low visual settings. The problem occurs on both Intel and AMD CPUs. Because of this, Battaglia recommends enabling Infinite‘s built-in dynamic resolution setting so that pixel counts can rise and fall to help stabilize performance during frantic, open-world encounters.
But something about this DRS system is triggering a constant, predictable freeze in the game’s frame time steadiness. Worse, the freeze is triggered by some form of rendering measurement inside the engine. So if you crank your frame rates higher, the freeze happens more often—like every four seconds when running at 120 fps. Yikes.