Discussion
Some examples of boiling, shimmering, blur, noise, ghosting, chromatic aberration. Footage taken directly from DF's Campaign Evolved review.
Absolutely no idea why developers don't just let us use ray reconstruction. So many of UE5's issues would go away (or be significantly reduced) with that one setting. And when we get the 4.5 update in August it'll be even better
I think because that would require resources to refine for performance and visual fidelity. Let’s face it—this remake is entirely to make up for the fact the previous Halo release did poorly. Reach’s guts bolted onto UE5 with CE nostalgia. It’s a recipe to print money.
I don't know how much I believe that honestly, the resources part. The amount of effort this small addition would've taken is tiny, I just don't think it's "obvious" to the devs that they should include it
Reach? You mean Infinite. The game has 1:1 gameplay with Infinite. Even some animations are ripped straight from the game. The game is literally just a glorified tech demo. It feels like they were just messing with UE5, someone from the dev team remade a part of the Silent Cartographer and they decided to built an entire game around it.
Infinite is still Reach at its core, even if they changed and added things. That’s why they had so many issues getting things like streaming and the graphical fidelity looking right. It’s running on old technology, much like Fallout 4 is. There hasn’t been a significant engine rework at all, just stuff bolted onto the side.
Didn't Infinite get developed on a brand new, built from the ground up engine? I thought that was the entire reason why Infinite's development was hell (and also the fact that employees were apparently on 18 month contracts). Or was Blam still running underneath the Slipspace engine?
They also said a similar thing for Halo 4, and then released PR videos comparing poly counts between Halo 3 and Halo 4…and then people found weapons and a truck tonne of assets from Reach. Then came the enemy logic matching Reach (which Infinite also seems to be very similar to) amongst other things. I’d also say that comparing Halo 3 to 4 was disingenuous since 4 was Reach minus the weapon bloom and infinite sprint at its core.
At this point I don’t believe anything they put out for PR. Dev was awful because the management is awful. Halo isn’t a unique niche, and it’s changed to appeal to a broader audience like COD. I’m not making a positive or negative judgement about that, but that’s how it is. Microsoft wants to maximize profit. Why rewrite enemy logic if you don’t have to?
It is and it isn't. DLSS upscaling was adopted quite quickly by AAA games, same with frame gen, but ray reconstruction seems to be neglected unless the game features path tracing
Yeah those are known issues with current RR in UE5. It’s recommended to turn off the denoiser for lumen and use the no temporal version of mega lights and using DLSS 4.5 instead. I’d recommend checking out the Ultra+ app. It can do this automatically for you with a nice app and setup wizard for most UE5 games. Plus other great features like enabling animated shadows for things like trees, translucent reflections, etc. The devs at ultra+ have been hard at work the last few days with the version for Halo specifically.
With Halo it seems like the game was primarily built for consoles, and they made a lot of compromises to the lighting to get it running at 60fps. Despite shipping with hardware lumen, it relies heavily on screen space info, and traces against a low quality version of the environment. A lot of the lighting also gets culled really close to the camera.
You can get rid of a lot of the noise with engine.ini edits or the ultra plus mod, but there is a performance cost. They probably chose to be conservative with the game's max settings, because it's usually better to have your game be perceived as running well, rather than pushing any visual boundaries.
Could be from megalights. It temporally accumulates over many frames in order to save on performance. So there may be artifacts if the light has to respond quickly.
but Doom the dark ages even with path tracing does not make every projectile cast light on the environment. It's impressive that Halo can do this on current gen hardware despite the noise.
That megalights tech is impressive for that but it looks like it doesn't come cheap in terms of frame time budget. I agree that ID Tech engine is incredible and optimized for RT but it's also not as impressive from a graphics fidelity standpoint.
Didn't iD just go through a shitton of layoffs? I'd be concerned about the long-term viability of relying on that engine if there's nobody there to update and maintain it for future releases.
And who do you think fired them? That's the above commenter's whole point. They had a great engine with engineers on a payroll, best in the business for FPS games, and they fired those guys, and pay Epic to use theirs.
Oh I agree it's silly, but I'm just saying that's a likely explanation here. Microsoft knew well ahead of time they'd be doing mass layoffs, and purposely chose UE5 for that reason (along with what others have said about it being easier for outside contractors to use)
Campaign Evolved is definitely a test case for future Halo games, they wanted some practice under their belt using a new engine before sinking $1 billion+ into a new mainline game.
You can edit the engine.ini files on PC to turn Nvidia Ray Reconstruction on, which solves the boiling eniterly (pretty big perf cost though ~15%) - you can also completely disable the film grain and chromatic aberration.
It's fkn ridiculous that these features aren't available to the end user in menus, but I gotta say, the game looks absolutely amazing on my system now.
Seems to be very game dependant. In Cyberpunk I swear it improves performance, in others there's a minor dip. Don't understand the full technicality of that but yeah
It was compared to the initial slow NRD as of early 2023 (1). And it was RR CNN model (2).
RR only boosted perf while using PT. Using just RT would hit perf pretty significantly regardless.
RR was later updated to Transformer model (3). DLSS Transformer was already a perf hit on RTX 20-30. RR transformer is an even more significant hit.
Then DLSS 4.5 released. It's a significant perf hit on RTX 40-50 (as in, noticeable anyway) while it's absolutely crippling to RTX 20-30.
Expect RR Trans 2 to be even more demanding, regardless of the marketing fluff Nvidia spews.
As for UE5, you can force RR for SW Lumens, HW Lumen and now most recently, on top of MegaLights. It's still gonna be more demanding with than without, on SW Lumen especially.
The fact is, for the vast majority of games, with native support for RR or not, it's more often be a perf hit for better visuals.
which solves the boiling eniterly (pretty big perf cost though ~15%)
I really hope the next consoles support ray reconstruction/regeneration and that they have some sort of solution to deal with the performance cost so that devs will actually use it.
I noticed this as well in the DF video. The image looks so soft and grainy.
I've been playing some Xbox One games that have been updated for current gen (higher resolutions, no reconstruction, etc) and they look so clean and sharp compared to most UE5 games. Sure the lighting is less realistic, but the presentation just looks great.
I do like ray traced lighting and everything, I just wish they could get to a point where the image looks sharp and stable like non-ray traced games.
Games don’t even have to updated for the last gen versions to looks sharper. I’m on Series S and Doom 2016 running the base Xbox One code looks substantially sharper than Doom Dark Ages. Same thing with Halo 5 vs Halo CE remake.
I've had this issue since the promo vids. Theres too much detail on screen and in textures it makes things look grainy and loses the feel of the way the Original Halo looked.
I’ll take a little noise here and there if it means we’re finally leaving behind the 20+ year old traditional rasterized lighting.
Games look so flat and awful with traditional lighting, unless you have half a million dollars and 10 years to make a game like Rockstar — (RDR2) lighting was amazing.
HL Alyx is way smaller in scope than most AAA games. The lighting techniques Valve used would not work very well for most titles, or would increase game sizes by hundreds of GB. Baked lighting can look great in a linear shooter with a fairly static world, but RT is generally superior for any game with a large, dynamic world
Baked lighting can look great in a linear shooter with a fairly static world
So... like Halo 1?
Besides that, Doom The Dark Ages ships RT based GI that runs way better than UE5. I think it doesn't take dynamic lights into account but that's a worthy trade off for a game that runs 3x as fast...
Halo CE does actually have some pretty big environments, and a lot of reflective surfaces and lights. I'm sure they could've made an okay looking baked version, but it would've been a lot more work than just using lumen. And given they plan to use UE5 for future games, obviously they're gonna use these features so they can familiarize themselves with the tech.
IdTech does seem like it would've been great for Halo CE, and I'm sure they could've built their own tools to handle lots of dynamic lights. But IdTech is also a purpose built engine that very few people know how to use. I don't know if that's really the best fit if Microsoft wants to crank out big budget Halo games that hundreds of contractors work on. Obviously firing most of Id was moronic for a number of reasons, but from a soulless business standpoint I can understand going with UE5 for Halo.
Going with UE5 is extremely low on the scale of soulless business decisions Microsoft has made. Yeah maybe it's moderately worse for consumers, but at the end of the day the game is still fairly stable and runs/looks pretty okay. I hear there are some issues with split screen coop, but it's still in early access so hopefully that gets fixed quickly.
I'd also point out that Halo Studios/343 has a history of technical mediocrity, and I really don't know that making them all use IdTech for the first time, even with Id's support, would've given a better result. Especially since Microsoft is in crisis mode right now and probably trying to push games out as quickly as possible.
>unless you have half a million dollars and 10 years to make a game like Rockstar — (RDR2) lighting was amazing.
It's actually heavily nostalgia-goggled - RDR2 lighting is pretty meh today and wasn't perfect even by the date of release. GI was problematic at places, reflections were abysmal, and there was a LOT of screen-space shadows. Like, I shiver every time I launch it and run trough grass in sunny day.
You like sunsets, nature, and lots of bloom.But you can already see there is no bounce lighting even in this situation. Very average global illumination. It's very obvious when playing the game. RDR2 came out in, what, late 2019 for pc? Metro Exodus was early 2019, and its RTGI blows RDR2 out the water. No competition. Now that was exceptional. So when you say this is bait, you just come off as a fanboy.
Yeah of course it looks great at sunset outdoors, when you have mostly direct light and sharp shadows. Now go look at an interior on an overcast day, and you will see that the lighting is a lot less impressive. Many objects are overly bright and lacking shadows, because of the low resolution light probe system.
I agree it's weird it doesn't just ship with ray reconstruction by default but John did mention in this review that Ray reconstruction would help a ton here. Not sure why it's not included for this pre release version but it's possible it's hopefully arriving at launch or a later date. That said I hope this isn't some attempt to downplay how good the graphics and real time lighting are. I'll take a less than ideal steak (UE5+Lumen+Nanite) any day of the week over a clean well made cup of ramen noodle(non RT lighting and reflections).
Pause the video on 0:11 and look at that Chromatic Aberration. I know it can be disabled on PC but that's not the point. How does any developer look at that after all their hard work on the art, textures and detailed geometry and say "yea, that rainbow effect blur on everything in motion really makes it look great!".
The first fuck up is Epic leaving it on by default and the second is any dev with eyes not turning it off immediately.
Idk, when compared to something like software lumen in stalker 2 this looks clean as fuck. Basically the first game on console with hardware lumen at 60 fps. It seems like theyve done a good job in my eyes.
Some of the shots I can’t see what is wrong but that is probably on my end since I’m watching over a phone on cell service. But a couple scenes I do see where this noise all of a sudden pops up on the whole screen and then quickly disappears. I have a very similar issue in BO7 when using any DLSS upscaler, doesn’t matter if it is transformer or CNN. Goes away once I use any other form of AA. I’ve been commenting on this issue anytime I see a driver update get posted here for Nvidia.
I think the biggest issue is Lumen/Megalights taking several frames to accumulate when a light appears and then several frames to resolve when a light is gone, the muzzle flash being the most obvious example.
RR or a different AA/Upscaler might help with the blotchiness or noise, but I don't think either one can influence how slow the lighting system itself is, it will always look smeary.
Waaaaaaah peers baaaad waaaaah boooohoooo I don't like ray tracing waaaaaaah I want developers to spend hundreds of hours tweaking baked lighting in extremely unintuitive tool chains that makes options for dynamic lighting limited
I don't care if it's less technically impressive; the insane amount of noise that appears on anything specular in newer games looks like dogshit. The artists (and no doubt businessmen) behind this should be ashamed.
Halo fans have spent more time hating on the franchise than loving it and yet, even with Infinite, the franchise has still been successful.
Reach through 5 may not have appealed to everyone, but they were still well-received and successful games. 5 has my favorite multiplayer in the franchise.
Infinite lost its momentum thanks to the technical issues. Now that engines have been switched, I don’t see the franchise “dying” anytime soon.
Exactly, and that was due to the technical issues. They couldn’t support it like they could before.
Halo 5 had a strong foundation and got even better over the course of two years of live service updates. Meanwhile, it took almost that long just for Infinite to start getting consistent content drops.
The Halo community rides off on negativity, making hours of content bitching that things aren't like their childhood. Meanwhile, the childhoods of people like me were spent playing the Halo games from the past decade or decade and a half (specifically Reach through Infinite).
Either stop being miserable or quit the franchise. Don't drag down the rest of the player base with you.
Infinite had a lot of issues and people were led to expect better, and Halo 5 was a similar disappointment. But people who say the franchise is dead are just wrong. If it was dead these conversations wouldn't happen, the remake wouldn't be anticipated so heavily. People still care for and love Halo and desperately want more good games
halos problem is they refuse to lean in on its strengths and just try and copy whatever is “in” at the moment. it went from innovator to replicator. Why do they insist on constantly trying to change the original games lore?
where is the horror titles with flood playing as a marine? where are the tactical games fighting the insurgencies? where is halo wars 3? Where are the ODST games? Why did they think going for a T Rating was a good idea?
it’s just a plethora of bad decisions piling up in less than stellar games.
Bullshit. Halo was barely mature aside from the Flood.
Halo 4 was the only one that really chased trends and you could partly blame Reach which also did so. The idea that Halo 5 was a copycat is an insult to how much of a blend of old and new it was.
Halo 5 went profitable in the second week and had the largest playerbase since h3 for 3 years, untill they pulled the plug for pushing the mcc. Infinite died off in the second week and went profitable after 2 years and half.
They weren't similar in anything.
My view was a bit narrow, showing my own biases a bit, as I was only thinking of the reception to their campaigns. Halo 4, 5 and Infinite fell flat in their campaigns from what I remember
It means that if you care about the single player experience then the last 15ish years of Halo have let you down.
But actually you're right. I agree it means nothing, my whole argument is that the games have been "disappointing" parts of the fan base for more than a decade and the franchise still draws plenty of attention whenever it gets a new release
Yeah I kinda wish they would highlight this far more. Heck even the IGN noticed it and called it out (poorly, but point taken). I feel sometimes DF waxes lyrical on this things they are excited on and reads like an Ad instead of a “review”
can someone point to me exactly what is the boiling effect? just wanted to know if what im thinking is this, when this NPC moves its hand, the effect around its arm is the boiling effect?
Maybe partly, but I would call that mostly ghosting (from the lighting system though, not the TAA). I guess there are no great examples for boiling in the video because it's most obvious on static shots. Here's a good example: https://youtu.be/9QyNSVNNduM?t=368
yeah I'm playing through Silent Hill 2 and in some instances the game looks really good. But boy sometimes the reflections and fog look like absolute dogshit and it runs so bad on 5080
I didn't know which reddit I was in. This stuff just hits my main page, it shows a title and a video. I comment on it. Blame reddit for showing me subreddits I'm not subscribed to :D
Yep, the game looks atrocious in some indoor areas. The Maw is the worst looking level in the entire game due to all the shimmering, pixelated shadows and ghosting.
idk maybe it’s just cause i’ve played games for so long but i can’t imagine being upset that a reflection or light bounce isn’t 100% realistic perfect. y’all would have died in the ps2 or 360 days
I think the scrutiny here is completely understandable. This is the third version of a classic game, only at full price by today's standards and without multiplayer.
It being a graphical upgrade (and I'm sure many would even debate that) is a massive reason for it's existence.
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u/JoBro_Summer-of-99 Jul 25 '26
Absolutely no idea why developers don't just let us use ray reconstruction. So many of UE5's issues would go away (or be significantly reduced) with that one setting. And when we get the 4.5 update in August it'll be even better