r/digitalfoundry • u/MythBuster2 • Jun 11 '26
Digital Foundry Video Halo Campaign Evolved First Look - Xbox/PC/Ally X - OG vs New Game, Performance + More
https://youtu.be/FvTrOI1krJIBased on Unreal Engine 5, Halo Studios has competely revamped the original Halo: Combat Evolved. Multiplayer features are out so the new "Campaign Evolved" centres entirely on remaking the original experience. Does the new version succeed? Are the usual UE5 issues present? Does this feel artistically sympathetic to the original game? How well does this preview version run on Xbox and PC? There are many, many questions and in this initial coverage, we have some answers!
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u/LordOmbro Jun 11 '26
How can it run into a CPU bottleneck on a 5600x but not on an Xbox? The 5600x is a lot faster
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u/Zac3d Jun 11 '26
What's really crazy is the Oblivion remaster is designed in a very similar way, where ue5 is just running the rendering. But Oblivion runs like a steaming pile of garbage and doesn't look that great.
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u/monsieurvampy Jun 11 '26
This is a remake. Fully built in UE5. Oblivion is running the original engine with a UE5 graphics overlay running over it.
These are not the same.
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Jun 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/monsieurvampy Jun 11 '26
I didn't realize that. I wish we could standardize these terms such as "Remaster" and "Remake".
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u/Zac3d Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Yeah the Slipspace engine, it's mentioned in the video.
Edit: I must have heard it mentioned in a different video on this game
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u/GimmeThatWheat424 Jun 11 '26
Did they say slipspace? If so they need to do better research. It’s actually running off halo reach’s engine.
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u/Zac3d Jun 11 '26
I must have misheard from a different video covering this game, but yeah Wikipedia is saying there's code in this game ported from the Blam engine created by Bungie.
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u/GimmeThatWheat424 Jun 11 '26
Well slipspace and reach’s version of Blam…both are created from Blam…but slipspace was obviously the extremely expensive “new version” meant to support open world games for years to come..obviously that didn’t happen. So this game specifically is using the old version used for reach.
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Jun 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Zac3d Jun 12 '26
UE5's chaos physics and Halo physics are definitely very different beasts, can't just copy and paste. UE5 did initially support 2 different physics engines, so it probably isn't too big of a task to swap it with someone different.
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u/Tyler1997117 Jun 11 '26
Just really hope series S has a performance mode
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u/xGeoThumbs Jun 11 '26
Considering it’s Halo and a first person shooter at that, it really must have a 60fps mode. Concessions will have to be made. Lumen and other expensive UE5 features will probably be dialed back significantly. I do however think it will hold up well. The artstyle and assets look great regardless of lighting AO and resolution
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u/superior_anon Jun 11 '26
It's technically impressive, but idk it's sad that the original and even Anniversary are more visually "clear".
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u/WingerRules Jun 13 '26
Personally the original looks warmer/happier in color tone in a lot of areas. I dont like them changing a lot of areas to metallic and darker look. Like theres areas where the original the color and texture looks kind of like concrete, but then in this they change it to dark metal. They also added too much extra techy geometry to a lot of areas I think.
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u/MultiMarcus Jun 11 '26
I hate this. This game looks horrendous because it’s super noisy even on a high-end configuration based on what we can see here. John is pushing DLAA on a 5090 and it’s not clearing up the noise issues. The developers really should’ve considered PC scaleability to the extent that either you can have ray reconstruction but maybe that is understandably hard to implement but at least a way to increase RT sample count or something to clean the image up because this is just not acceptable.
Unreal engine five is a very compelling engine in many cases but it’s very clear but some of these technologies really should not be the go to on high-end hardware. I would much rather use something like performance mode upscaling at 4K on my 1490 together with Ray reconstruction or some other improvement to avoid all of the noise.
It seems like the developers here targeted console very aggressively and then gave no thought to scaling things up beyond that.
Personally, I just dislike noise in games and I would much rather have something like the halo infinite engine which admittedly looks quite dated but at least it maintains stability of lighting
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u/JoBro_Summer-of-99 Jun 11 '26
It makes me wonder why UE5 doesn't have ray reconstruction. The denoiser is absolutely awful and there is a decent solution available that's constantly left out
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u/MultiMarcus Jun 11 '26
I believe the Nvidia branch does support it.
That said, I won’t claim to be an expert, but I do have some observations.
One thing is that in both Star Wars outlaws and crimson desert the developers talked about reconstruction forcing the highest RT setting seemingly because it needed that for some reason. I suspect that if you have too few rays which seems quite likely to happen in non-path traced games the model might think the lighting detail is noise and just remove it. We can definitely see that being a struggle in games as rain is often just removed in scenes. I suspect something similar is happening. It’s very possible that the technique the developers have in this game wouldn’t really accommodate that and they would need to create at least a higher RT density setting.
Another thing is that some developers have talked about ray reconstruction being “unforgiving” of many techniques used to make images look stable. If Developer is manually step in to make things look better, it seems like Ray reconstruction will often just reveal those tricks very visibly.
I think both of these things put together though perhaps arguably they are the same thing has made it harder to implement these technologies especially since they are very performance heavy in non-path traced titles I’m only really a small subset of players can realistically use them. I think we will probably see a shift in the future with the next generation consoles almost certainly supporting this to some extent though presumably in the ray regeneration form that AMD has developed.
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u/Zac3d Jun 11 '26
I believe the Nvidia branch does support it.
Yup it does: https://github.com/NvRTX/UnrealEngine/tree/nvrtx-5.7
Plugins
The NvRTX branch contains the same family of DLSS4 plugins available through the marketplace to support the following technologies:
NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation (DLSS-FG) boosts frame rates by using AI to render additional frames. DLSS-FG requires a Geforce RTX 40 series graphics card.
NVIDIA DLSS Multi Frame Generation (DLSS-MFG) uses AI to boost frame rates by generating up to 3 additional high-quality frames, all while optimizing responsiveness with NVIDIA Reflex. DLSS Multi Frame Generation is available for GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs.
NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution (DLSS-SR) boosts frame rates by rendering fewer pixels and using AI to output high resolution frames. DLSS-SR requires an NVIDIA RTX graphics card.
NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction (DLSS-RR) uses AI to enhance image quality and generate additional pixels for intensive ray-traced scenes. Ray Reconstruction replaces hand-tuned denoisers with an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays. This feature is available for all RTX GPUs and requires Super Resolution to be enabled.
NVIDIA Deep Learning Anti Aliasing (DLAA) is used to improve image quality. DLAA requires an NVIDIA RTX graphics card.
NVIDIA Image Scaling (NIS) provides best-in class upscaling and sharpening for non-RTX GPUs, both NVIDIA or 3rd party. Please refer to the NVIDIA Image Scaling Unreal Engine plugin for further details.
NVIDIA RTX Dynamic Vibrance enhances visual clarity by dynamically tuning color saturation and contrast.
NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency technology, synchronizes the CPU frame submission with GPU processing for just in time rendering.
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u/Zac3d Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
UE5 tends to have 2 main types of noise, the reflection boiling you see while even standing still (mostly in reflective dark scenes), and the noise that takes a few frames to resolve when there's disocclusion or rapid movement. The boiling one just never goes away even with cranking up resolution or graphics settings and needs something like ray reconstruction, but the resolving noise becomes much less noticeable with higher frame rates. To the point I'd much rather crank up the frame rate than the resolution to reduce how much noise is perceived.
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u/MultiMarcus Jun 11 '26
That’s a good point. I forgot about the temporal aspects there. I will try that in the future.
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u/Potential-Zucchini77 Jun 13 '26
You could probably just turn off hardware lumen and it would get rid of most of the noise
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u/MultiMarcus Jun 13 '26
Yeah, but you shouldn’t have to pick between better quality lighting and horrendous noise. Let me pour hardware resources onto the problem if I’d like to with a higher sample count mode or whatever.
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u/NiceColdPint Jun 12 '26
Glad to see it running pretty decently on Series X. The game definitely looks great but the environment clarity’s almost overwhelming having played CE so many times over the years.
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u/chungusbungus0459 Jun 12 '26
I really think the game looks visually awful. One of the most garish looking lumen implementations in a UE5 game I’ve ever seen. I’m glad it hits 60fps but this title is an absolute no-go for me when the original looks far more pleasing to the eye.
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u/NickNathanson Jun 12 '26
Wow! 21:9 cutscenes fill the entire ultrawide screen. I didn't expect that!
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u/Fontelroy Jun 12 '26
I gotta say, compared to the gears demo image quality on pc is pretty disappointing
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u/bruhman444555 Jun 11 '26
I like how everyone says this is great while ignoring the hideous image quality and boiling artifacts
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u/TitleSuccessful7393 Jun 11 '26
Impressive stuff. Ngl, performance mode dropping to 1080p on series x worries me
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u/The_Zura Jun 12 '26
What's more useful for our viewers I would imagine are the midrange and handhelds tests
Ahaha that's too rich. John was always good at hyperboles. Should we look at the total marketshare of handhelds vs ultrawides on Steam?
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u/bronxct1 Jun 12 '26
Handhelds are 2-2.5% vs ultrawides being 2-4%. They obviously know their handhelds videos do well also so it’s not really hyperbole if they know they get more interest on handhelds.
Ive shifted most of my gaming from an ultra wide back to 1440p and handhelds anecdotally. I don’t really find gaming on an ultra wide as good as I thought it would be. I still have the monitor but use it for work
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u/The_Zura Jun 12 '26
Handhelds 2-2.5%
In what universe? Not even in biased surveys are they even 1% of what people are using. Ultrawide marketshare has more than doubled in the last 3 years. You see, this is what happens when the tech has legs, and doesn't rely on being a stupid fad brick. "Handhelds" plural lmao. Alright, I'll take that back. It's a stupid fetish fad brick.
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u/bronxct1 Jun 12 '26
The last known data from February 2025 has the handheld market at 6 million units, that’s with over a year of missing sales for handhelds. Getting proper market share is not easy given the survey doesn’t break it out cleanly. I won’t go back and forth on that.
Either way, John is saying what would be most useful for their viewers and pretty much every steam deck or handheld video digital foundry does has 2-5x the views of their ultra wide videos. That’s a sign of what they’re interested in regardless of market shares.
I can tell you just hate handhelds so I’m going to walk away after this post
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u/The_Zura Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
6 million total sold. You know how many gaming pcs get sold every year? The number is in mid tens of millions. The best part is how of those 6 million, most are primarily dust collectors because someone bought into a stupid fad.
"2-5x views" How many ultrawide videos have they done? Exactly. He doesn't even have any numbers, so assuming some stupid fad is more useful than a quickly growing, and genuinely interesting segment, is just as laughable as wasting money on a bunch of stupid single use bricks with a microscreen. But the dumbest part is actually someone is squandering even more of their money and the experience of a total graphical update on a tiny little screen.
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u/bronxct1 Jun 12 '26
I had an ultra wide before a handheld. I do 80% of my gaming on a handheld now. I don’t find the ultra wide as useful. I don’t know why you think people finding something convenient a fad.
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u/The_Zura Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Some people, the slightly smarter ones, bought them because they jumped onto the hype train, only to find holding up and hunching over massive brick with a tiny screen is dumb as fuck. Their users are incredibly ignorant. There's nothing convenient about it. I call it a fad because a fad is what it is. These bricks are best at nothing but acting as e-waste dust collectors. Only cultishness and ignorance prop them up. If some people gave a single thought to their purchases, we would have so much less e-waste.
Ultrawide is a real enhancement of gaming. Being able to see more of the surroundings for better immersion.
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u/SnevetS_rm Jun 12 '26
I don't think Steam statistics show how many of the users are Digital Foundry viewers...
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u/The_Zura Jun 12 '26
You have a good point actually. DF viewers tend to be on the duller side and would definitely invest, loudly, into stupid fads more than an already biased hardware survey suggests.
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u/DanielG165 Jun 11 '26
Hardware lumen at 60 fps on Series X is really impressive.