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Halo 3 for pc full#
With Halo 3 though, I played the game through beautifully at 120fps with almost all elements of the game animating as they should at full frame-rate. Prior Halo releases have had issues with frame-rate interpolation, meaning that the game can run in excess of 60fps, but animations do not, ruining the HFR experience. However, the light systems requirements make this game perfect for a high refresh rate display where you stand an extremely good chance of maxing a 240Hz screen or higher. However, Halo 3 is a title that's very light on the CPU - a Ryzen 9 3900X delivered over 400fps barely touching most of its cores, so I suspect that any modern CPU will blaze its way through this game.Īs long as you have DX11 support, the GPU requirement is minimal too, to the point where our mainstream graphics stalwarts - Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 and AMD's Radeon RX 580 easily ran the game in excess of 60 frames per second at 4K resolution. Here, moving from enhanced to original graphics increased performance by 24 per cent on the CPU and going down further from enhanced to performance mode increased CPU performance by 55 per cent.
Halo 3 for pc 720p#
This effect has a generally more transformative effect on CPU performance, which I tested by playing the game at 720p and leaving the GPU under-utilised. If you are GPU-limited, going down from enhanced to original increases performance by around four per cent and going down to performance mode with all of its cuts to draw distance increases performance by 17 per cent over the enhanced setting. Below the original graphical option, you have a performance mode as well, which further reduces the distance of draw to levels very close to the camera - useful if you have a particularly old PC. This applies to elements like grass as well, but even the standard original distance for grass is not exactly bad. Dynamic models like enemy corpses or smaller objects render out further into the distance away from the camera.
Halo 3 for pc Pc#
Halo 3 doesn't get a full-on remaster like its predecessors in the Master Chief Collection, but similar to the other PC ports you can push out the draw distance of static and dynamic world objects. There are some proper upgrades in this new release too - such as a field of view slider and an enhanced graphics option that delivers visuals in excess of the Xbox One version of the game. It was all there back in 2007, just hidden behind low resolution and murky anisotropic filtering - something that is not an issue for today's technology. On close inspection, I was even surprised to find that Halo 3 very rarely uses a form of offset bump mapping or rudimentary parallax mapping on some textures. On today's PC hardware running at 4K resolution, a lot of fine detail you may have missed is resolved - the scratches on metal, for example, or the highly detailed ground textures. While the console lacked substantial system RAM - certainly by today's standards - Bungie worked around this by using a lot of decals and tiling detail textures on a lot of the game's asset. While I definitely recall Halo 3's visual blemishes - like its character modelling and some of its choices for animation, sound, and lighting technology - seeing the game again at higher resolution and frame-rate serves to liberate the original assets from Xbox 360's technical limitations. Beyond the fact that a genuinely great game is now available to PC gamers, what I particularly like about this release is that running it at 4K 60fps actually gave me a much better appreciation of some of the original game's technical achievements - elements that were hard to spot in the sub-720p Xbox 360 original.
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The Master Chief Collection for PC adds another classic game to its ranks - and the arrival of Halo 3 brings with it terrific performance, the best support yet for high refresh rate gaming and even some nice enhancements to existing games in the collection.