As is usually the case a fresh release of a game has come with a few bugs that will no doubt will be patched ASAP by 343. In the meantime I found that, as I suspected, there are work arounds for the bugs. But it was very frustrating to actually find them. For a start the FPS counter internal to the game bears no relationship to the actual frame rate once the work arounds have been applied. It was showing 25 FPS for me but examining in game animations showed a much higher frame rate. This is especially obvious on smoke, sparks and the energy coursing through Fusion Coils (the canisters you can pickup and throw). Even my AMD overlay FPS counter seemed inaccurate, although that might have had something to do with using GlosSI. But the Halo FPS counter problem could just be a bug on the developers part or something to do with new DirectX 12 features. What ever the reason I ignored all FPS counters.
So to get Halo Infinite in a playable state do this ! …
- Make sure Vsync is not forced on in your GPU control panel.
- Make sure to uninstall the High-Res Textures. This really is the source of so much trouble ! It breaks Async Compute on my machine. I know because when I first turned on Async it halved the frame rate so I left it off thinking it just did not work with my GPU. So when I tried turning it on again after removing the High-Res textures I suddenly got the expected performance boost!
- Set graphics settings to the following. Don’t get put off by the max 30 FPS setting as the FPS becomes clearly above that in game evidenced by fast and smooth animations. Setting it to this is likely a work around for a buggy scaler/frame limiter, but I can’t be sure because I can’t see what is going on inside the game engine “black box” (ie, the proprietary code). But I can see the effect on the game, ie. improved response times and fast animations regardless of what setting or FPS counters are telling me. BTW You can see which are the most intensive graphics settings in this article.
So at the core of the problem is the High-Res texture pack. It makes everything look worse ! It lowers frame rate which makes everything look worse ! It breaks Async compute !
There are also bugs in the Halo Scaler/Frame Limiter which I think I’ve worked around here with some of the settings.
Halo can be got to a playable state on the PC ! This was on my AMD RX590 8GB and Intel 4690K CPU (nothing overclocked).
