Halo Campaign Evolved hits 120 FPS max at 1440p Ultra on a GeForce RTX 5090

Halo: Combat Evolved is a built-from-the-ground-up remake of the first game's iconic and memorable campaign, and it's out next month for PC, Xbox consoles, and PS5. As the first game in the Halo series to be built on Unreal Engine 5, the latest story-based trailer that focused on the remake's brand-new prequel missions was generally well-received from the community, with many highlighting its impressive visuals.

Earlier this week, we reported on the game's PC requirements and specifications from Halo Studios, which outlined some pretty powerful GPU hardware and even 32 GB of system memory to run the game at High and Ultra settings. Today we've got a new hands-on video from FPS-focused YouTube channel jackfrags, which offers hands-on impressions and even early performance information for the game's PC build.

As the release is still several weeks away and we can expect day-one drivers from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, what we see here could improve. For the most part, it's great news, in that Halo: Combat Evolved seems to run smoothly and without stuttering across indoor and outdoor missions, and on and off vehicles. The only downside is that the GeForce RTX 5090 seems to top out at around 120 FPS when playing the game at 1440p with Ultra settings and DLAA.

Throughout the video, we see the frame rate hover between 90 and 120 FPS, which is good news for performance stability. An additional video from Digital Foundry, which also covers Xbox Series X performance, touches on the same PC build of the game, suggesting that performance depends more heavily on the CPU than we normally see.

In fact, locking the frame rate to 4K 60 FPS with Ultra settings and DLSS (the same DLSS anti-aliasing as the 1440p performance above), GPU usage hovers around 50%, indicating that 4K 100+ FPS is possible and that your CPU will bottleneck the game's 1080p and 1440p performance. Digital Foundry ran a test with a GeForce RTX 4060 at 1080p with a Ryzen 5 5600X using DLSS Balanced, and performance sits between 50 and 60 FPS. Digital Foundry also shows the game running on an ROG Xbox Ally X handheld, albeit at around 40 FPS with upscaling and Very Low settings.