Halo: Campaign Evolved has launched in early access, which has been met with glowing praise from critics and scorn from Xbox players who are having trouble accessing the early access period due to technical difficulties.
However, if you're planning on playing this game on PC or Steam or Xbox on PC, but are stuck with old hardware thanks to rising prices on newer PC components caused by the ongoing RAM Crisis, we have good news.
Our friends at PC Gamer have discovered through rigorous testing that Halo: Campaign Evolved can be played at low settings and still look almost as good as it does on Ultra settings on PC.
I've been squirrelled away in the PC Gamer office all week testing Halo: Campaign Evolved on all manner of hardware, including a beastly rig with an RTX 5080 and Ryzen 7 7700X3D. To my surprise, the difference between Low and Ultra is incredibly subtle and, frankly, not worth the performance hit.
James Bentley, Hardware Writer at PC Gamer
For further context, PC Gamer tested Halo: Campaign on several PCs running NVIDIA RTX 3070, NVIDIA RTX 4070, NVIDIA RTX 5080, and AMD RX 9070 GPUs, and noticed there were very few differences between Low and Ultra settings when it comes to the graphics.
The biggest differences were blood textures and weapon lighting being slightly more detailed on Ultra, whereas foliage details, lighting softness, and shadow textures were only barely more detailed.
As for the game's framerate performance, PC Gamer noted that differences are much more prominent in this regard. Running Halo: Campaign Evolved on Ultra settings cuts the performance down by at least 20% across multiple rigs, particularly if the DLSS upscaling setting is set to Ultra.
Meanwhile, keeping the game at low graphical presets keeps the game's framerates somewhat high without a dip in their consistency, without the need for DLSS upscaling.
For example, running the game on Ultra graphical presets at 1440p with Ultra DLSS settings saw Halo Campaign Evolved achieve 60fps (RTX 3070), 84fps (RTX 4070 Super) , and 127fps (RTX 5080).
Whereas running the low graphical presets at 1440p with low DSLL settings saw Halo Campaign Evolved achieve 82fps (RTX 3070), 148fps (RTX 4070 Super), and 172fps (RTX 5080), giving much higher framerates with minimal changes in graphical fidelity.
PC Gamer even tested Halo: Campaign Evolved out on the Xbox ROG Ally X and discovered that running the game on Ultra or Native upscaling tanks its performance hard. PC Gamer recommends running the game using the Xbox Rog Ally X's Very Low preset option to get the performance out of it.
PC Gamer concluded that unless you have a monster PC rig that can push hundreds of frames per second or if you don't mind playing the game at around 30fps, they recommend playing the game on Low settings for the best balance of performance and appearance.
Though they also recommend turning off the motion blur, as it makes the game look pretty terrible.
Now, while I plan on playing Halo: Campaign Evolved on Xbox Series X after hearing how awesome it is from my colleague Brendan Lowry, who gave it 4/5 stars, I'm glad PC players won't be forced to upgrade their rigs to play it at acceptable levels.
We are living in a dire age of tech where it's getting harder for PC gamers to play the latest games without scouring the internet for increasingly scarce and pricey components needed to run them, so any AAA game that's optimized enough to be played on older hardware without losing too much graphical fidelity is a blessing we'll gladly take.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is available in early access and will be released to the general public on July 28, 2026, for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC via Windows and Steam.
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