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Graphical Fidelity I Expect This Gen

Halo's first few levels were kinda disappointing. the open world looked straight out of Halo Infinite. I saw poor LOD for foliage. Mid looking rocks. Pretty last gen lighting.

The desert level at night also looked last gen.

But then you get up to the Covenant ship and its like they figured out Nanite and Lumen, and it looks marvelous. As close to CG as ive seen a TPS look this gen.

Bhbwmdn.gif
 
Halo's first few levels were kinda disappointing. the open world looked straight out of Halo Infinite. I saw poor LOD for foliage. Mid looking rocks. Pretty last gen lighting.

The desert level at night also looked last gen.

But then you get up to the Covenant ship and its like they figured out Nanite and Lumen, and it looks marvelous. As close to CG as ive seen a TPS look this gen.

Bhbwmdn.gif

Papito I recommend you to use this. These complaints about the foliage and lighting can be fixed with ultra plus. In fact anyone with a powerful computer should always use Ultra plus with UE5 games on pc because it makes the graphics much better every single time. You can push the LOD further, lighting quality and distance etc

 
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Am i being particularly lucky or halo remake is the best running ue5 title...ever or at least in a hot minute? feel liike i'm playing an id engine game but with actual good graphic.

that's ingame, cutscenes are weird but i heard it's a known problem.
 
Am i being particularly lucky or halo remake is the best running ue5 title...ever or at least in a hot minute? feel liike i'm playing an id engine game but with actual good graphic.

that's ingame, cutscenes are weird but i heard it's a known problem.

For me the performance was flawless. Zero stuttering or hitching. I didn't have any issues at all
 
Halo's first few levels were kinda disappointing. the open world looked straight out of Halo Infinite. I saw poor LOD for foliage. Mid looking rocks. Pretty last gen lighting.

The desert level at night also looked last gen.

But then you get up to the Covenant ship and its like they figured out Nanite and Lumen, and it looks marvelous. As close to CG as ive seen a TPS look this gen.

Bhbwmdn.gif
I didn't liked the human ship but the planet was already an upgrade, but yeah not as good looking as black flag overall.

I have yet to reach the ship in the gif.
 
Correct. Unlike e-day, they have turned off shadow casting for dynamic light sources in megalights. E-day doesn't seem to cast shadows for projectiles as they travel, but has it for muzzle flash, explosions etc, in addition to most environmental/static light sources.
That's a shame it's not an option on PC, would look great for high end setups. If it's an engine setting I really can't understand why they would block it completely.
 
Am i being particularly lucky or halo remake is the best running ue5 title...ever or at least in a hot minute? feel liike i'm playing an id engine game but with actual good graphic.

that's ingame, cutscenes are weird but i heard it's a known problem.
It runs well if you compare it to other modern UE5 releases but we should consider that it's basically rendering levels from a 2001 game which likely makes things a lot easier.
And even so I've managed to hit CPU limit at 60 on my 5900X in the Truth and Reconciliation hangar after the main battle there.
All in all it is running better than other recent modern UE5 games but the difference isn't THAT big. This one I've beaten in 4K DLSS-B with FG, those other I usually play with DLSS-P.
 
?

Games don't even have compiled shaders for Nvidia, Intel or AMD.. On consoles you can do that.
yeah, and i dont get why. just do it when you are installing/downloading the game. why do i have to compile shaders after install or sometimes after every boot?

in this video, the guy says that the shaders are stored in an nvidia driver folder. and that folder can get full so you may not even compile all shaders, hence the stuttering. Like what? who came up with that brilliant idea?

And to make matters worse, there is no way to automatically clean up that folder in the latest drivers so if you uninstall a game, they may not get deleted from that folder. its way too convoluted.
 
yeah, and i dont get why. just do it when you are installing/downloading the game. why do i have to compile shaders after install or sometimes after every boot?

in this video, the guy says that the shaders are stored in an nvidia driver folder. and that folder can get full so you may not even compile all shaders, hence the stuttering. Like what? who came up with that brilliant idea?

And to make matters worse, there is no way to automatically clean up that folder in the latest drivers so if you uninstall a game, they may not get deleted from that folder. its way too convoluted.

I think Nvidia folder is ~15GB on default settings now and new games will overwrite old shaders if you Max it out. You can also change the size to 100GB.

There is new option in drivers to compile old driver shaders to new driver shaders in Nvidia app.
 
It runs well if you compare it to other modern UE5 releases but we should consider that it's basically rendering levels from a 2001 game which likely makes things a lot easier.
And even so I've managed to hit CPU limit at 60 on my 5900X in the Truth and Reconciliation hangar after the main battle there.
All in all it is running better than other recent modern UE5 games but the difference isn't THAT big. This one I've beaten in 4K DLSS-B with FG, those other I usually play with DLSS-P.
Halo levels have always been way bigger than your average ps2 era game. At least some of them. The indoor levels i agree are a bit on the small side, but it seems like they reworked the flood library levels so im excited to check them out. The performance is surprisingly good for consoles considering its 1244p internally before being upscaled to 4k using TSR. Basically 4k TSR balanced. With hardware lumen no less. Previously, consoles would have to settle for software lumen, and at 1080p. A couple of years ago, it would be 864p with software lumen before they upgraded to 5.4. It's huge on consoles.

Now on PC, yeah, ive not really had many issues. Even before the CPU engine upgrades, my 5.1 Ghz CPU handled the single threaded UE5 engine just fine at 60 fps. Ive been enabling hardware lumen even in non-supported games since 2024 and maxing them out without any issues on both my 3080 and now 5080. So not seeing a huge difference here. But on consoles, its amazing what they've done in the last couple of years.
 
That's a shame it's not an option on PC, would look great for high end setups. If it's an engine setting I really can't understand why they would block it completely.
May be related to the version of UE5. I believe the game runs UE5.5, which is when megalights was released as experimental. Unless they backported the production ready 5.8 version, there could be bugs/memory leaks/crashes that they would want to avoid.

Having said that, I've never fully understood why most higher end settings in UE 5 never make it as scalable PC options in most games! :messenger_grinning_sweat:

I think it all comes down to how much resource (QA/performance tuning/optimization etc) they are willing to spend on features that are used by a tiny percentage of the player base.
 
PC gaming is so weird. I dont understand why the vendor needs to release drivers to improve performance on GPUs. Everything should be included with the game just like on consoles.

Consoles do get these drivers updates as system updates but sure, not on a game to game basis as it's fixed hardware.

Agnostic API calls still have to be converted into low-level machine instructions and that's where they tweak compilers to handle it better and save on performances. Each GPU or at least GPU families use unique backend compilers tailored to their architectures, so pushing that responsibility on devs would probably end up catastrophic. Removing that would mean that AMD and Nvidia and all GPU families have a singular common compiler, I don't think it'll ever happen.

It used to be way worse pre-DX12 / Vulkan. Devs kind of had the responsibility of making their games work on GPUs, they would fuck up (duh), designing sub optimal code or hit architecture bottlenecks they did not see coming and driver teams basically hijacked the pipeline to make their shit run well.
 
Watching DFs' PC review and its funny to see the Zen 3 5600 struggle to hit 60 fps. Especially when consoles with their zen 2 CPUs can handle it just fine. The lumen artifacts on reflections that need ray reconstruction to fix are also bizarre. I have not seen them before.

Tim Sweeney was right. You will always have devs who fuck things up and it makes the engine look bad. Samson also shipped in a disastrous state despite being on UE5.7 and while they actually shipped with ray reconstruction, they forgot to optimize everything else. Took them quite a few weeks to finally sort out all the performance issues.

It's frustrating because Hardware Lumen is supposed to remove the boiling and artifacts since its more accurate than software lumen, but devs just cant get it right.
 
Watching DFs' PC review and its funny to see the Zen 3 5600 struggle to hit 60 fps. Especially when consoles with their zen 2 CPUs can handle it just fine. The lumen artifacts on reflections that need ray reconstruction to fix are also bizarre. I have not seen them before.

Tim Sweeney was right. You will always have devs who fuck things up and it makes the engine look bad. Samson also shipped in a disastrous state despite being on UE5.7 and while they actually shipped with ray reconstruction, they forgot to optimize everything else. Took them quite a few weeks to finally sort out all the performance issues.

It's frustrating because Hardware Lumen is supposed to remove the boiling and artifacts since its more accurate than software lumen, but devs just cant get it right.

Or maybe DF has screw up again with their testing methodology.
It's not the first time, they post numbers of benchmarks on PC that are way off what everyone else is seeing.


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Or maybe DF has screw up again with their testing methodology.
It's not the first time, they post numbers of benchmarks on PC that are way off what everyone else is seeing.


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Right. But even this shows that the 5600x is competing with the 10600k even though they are three generations apart. 5000 series came out the same year as the 13000 intel series.

I think current gen games in general dont perform well on zen 2 and 3 CPUs unless they have 3d cache, and because they ran so cool compared to intel CPUs, everyone bought them and had issues when modern games started pushing them. Zen 4 is when AMD finally fixed those issues for non-3d CPUs, but zen 2 and zen3 CPUs were very popular and are still owned by millions of PC players. I will never stop praising my 2021 11700k. i thought the microcenter guy fooled me into buying it, but thank god for him. havent had any issues with ray traced games or single threaded bethesda or UE4 or UE5 or path traced games.

Consoles may be using Zen 2 CPUs but they dont have the same overhead and both PS5 and XSX use dedicated decompression hardware to offload some of the CPU processing.

Edit: Actually i did have an issue with running path tracing in Wukong that im pretty sure was CPU related because it would cause insane frametime spikes whenever i had enemies on screen. killing them put the framerate back to 60 so it was clearly a CPU issue. other than that though, zero issues in cyberpunk, star wars outlaws, indy and resident evil 9 path tracing.
 
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Right. But even this shows that the 5600x is competing with the 10600k even though they are three generations apart. 5000 series came out the same year as the 13000 intel series.

I think current gen games in general dont perform well on zen 2 and 3 CPUs unless they have 3d cache, and because they ran so cool compared to intel CPUs, everyone bought them and had issues when modern games started pushing them. Zen 4 is when AMD finally fixed those issues for non-3d CPUs, but zen 2 and zen3 CPUs were very popular and are still owned by millions of PC players. I will never stop praising my 2021 11700k. i thought the microcenter guy fooled me into buying it, but thank god for him. havent had any issues with ray traced games or single threaded bethesda or UE4 or UE5 or path traced games.

Consoles may be using Zen 2 CPUs but they dont have the same overhead and both PS5 and XSX use dedicated decompression hardware to offload some of the CPU processing.

Intel 10th gen was released in the first half of 2020. Zen3 was released near the end of 2020.
They are basically the same generation of CPUs, and have always traded blows.
Intel 13th gen was released 2 years after Zen3. And Zen4 was released at the same time as Intel 13th Gen.
 
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Right. But even this shows that the 5600x is competing with the 10600k even though they are three generations apart. 5000 series came out the same year as the 13000 intel series.

I think current gen games in general dont perform well on zen 2 and 3 CPUs unless they have 3d cache, and because they ran so cool compared to intel CPUs, everyone bought them and had issues when modern games started pushing them. Zen 4 is when AMD finally fixed those issues for non-3d CPUs, but zen 2 and zen3 CPUs were very popular and are still owned by millions of PC players. I will never stop praising my 2021 11700k. i thought the microcenter guy fooled me into buying it, but thank god for him. havent had any issues with ray traced games or single threaded bethesda or UE4 or UE5 or path traced games.

Consoles may be using Zen 2 CPUs but they dont have the same overhead and both PS5 and XSX use dedicated decompression hardware to offload some of the CPU processing.

SOME games run better on Intel cores vs. AMD cores. This was evident in Starfield tests and in some UE5 games this is true as well. This is 5600x vs. 11 and 10 series:

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5600x is from 2020, alder lake (12 gen) is from 2021.
 
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Intel 10th gen was released in the first half of 2020. Zen3 was released near the end of 2020.
They are basically the same generation of CPUs, and have always traded blows.
Intel 13th gen was released 2 years after Zen3. And Zen4 was released at the same time as Intel 13th Gen.
I stand corrected.
 
I stand corrected.

Also consider that 11th Gen is just an 10th Gen with the hardware fixes for Specter and Meltdown.
In a way, 11th Gen was a terrible CPU. In part because it brought no performance improvements over 10th Gen.
But mostly, because just half a year later, Intel released 12th Gen, which is a much better CPU in all regards.
 
Also consider that 11th Gen is just an 10th Gen with the hardware fixes for Specter and Meltdown.
In a way, 11th Gen was a terrible CPU. In part because it brought no performance improvements over 10th Gen.
But mostly, because just half a year later, Intel released 12th Gen, which is a much better CPU in all regards.
It had extraordinarily poor reviews at the time and i was pissed at first. I don't know why it was being compared against the zen 2 cpus at the time instead of the 5000 series but I remember the thermals were really bad and i had to upgrade my cooling, and add like four fans to my case just to keep it cool.

What i didn't realize was that it didn't have a 65 watt cap the AMD cpus did and that allowed it to hit 5 ghz and just brute force the games. Cyberpunk in path tracing hits 140 watts. Dragon age with that hair tech was also hitting 130 watts. So it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because i was able to manage its higher temps and skip an expensive switch to AMD. Especially now that the ram prices have turned the $600 amd mobo ram bundles into $800 ones.
 
It had extraordinarily poor reviews at the time and i was pissed at first. I don't know why it was being compared against the zen 2 cpus at the time instead of the 5000 series but I remember the thermals were really bad and i had to upgrade my cooling, and add like four fans to my case just to keep it cool.

What i didn't realize was that it didn't have a 65 watt cap the AMD cpus did and that allowed it to hit 5 ghz and just brute force the games. Cyberpunk in path tracing hits 140 watts. Dragon age with that hair tech was also hitting 130 watts. So it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because i was able to manage its higher temps and skip an expensive switch to AMD. Especially now that the ram prices have turned the $600 amd mobo ram bundles into $800 ones.

The reviews I saw at the time, compared it to the 10th gen and Zen3 CPUs. Techspot, Techpowerup, Gamers Nexus, Guru3D, etc.
And they all criticized it only for not bringing any performance improvements, especially compared to Intel's own 10th Gen.
It's not that it was a bad CPU, it's just that it brought nothing new.

AMD Zen3 CPUs have a 65W and 125W power limits. Though they are rather flexible.
For example, the 5700X has a 65W limit. And the 5800X has a 105W limit.
The Intel 11700K also had a 5Ghz boost clock. Though it had a PL2 of 250W.
You are very mistaken if you think that 11Th Gen used less power than Zen3.

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If you had gone with AMD, you would have to get AM4, and that means now you could upgrade to a 5800X3D. This means you could have near the performance of a 12900K.
 
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You are very mistaken if you think that 11Th Gen used less power than Zen3
I dont think i said that.

Hopefully CA is banned in every single UE5 moving forward

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CA is actually really bad here even for a pro CA guy like myself. At least outdoors. Indoors it works to give the game a filmic look. But outdoors all trees and foliage are muddy.
 
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I thought this looked good...almost motorstorm, almost hitting 65% of it. if only the debris stay onscreen instead of disappearing


Been playing without HUD or minimal HUD since Horizon Forbidden West. Halo Remake has way too many HUD objects. turning that off made the game look so much better.

The lighting atleast in SP looks great



Looks very good. Like really good. I was just bitching about how bad night time lighting looks in games after watching Odyssey which looks absolutely stunning during its night time scenes in Troy.

IW has always been good at lighting though. I remember their Amsterdam level went viral a few years ago despite being effectively a last gen level.
 
This is not good lighting, you guys. The reveal trailer had RT reflections. I don't even see that now. It's noisy as fuck SSR. The bus reflection disappears completely when NPC falls out and occludes it

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No RTGI either. There's no bounce lighting from any lights, static or dynamic. Did they prerender the reveal in the market scene or something?


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The only thing noteworthy is the lighting from muzzle flash and explosions. But even those don't cast shadows. Muzzle flash has shadows just for the NPC firing the weapon. Nothing/Nobody else. Killzone did this on ps3.


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So what even is the need for this to be current gen only?
 
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I thought this looked good...almost motorstorm, almost hitting 65% of it. if only the debris stay onscreen instead of disappearing
Been playing without HUD or minimal HUD since Horizon Forbidden West. Halo Remake has way too many HUD objects. turning that off made the game look so much better.
No HUD is a difficulty increase for some games, but I do enjoy it. You have to have 100% confidence about button shortcuts and the game's map design though.

No HUD will really emphasize how bad a game's map/level design is if it's bad.
 
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