JareBear: Remastered
Banned
Alex from DF breaks down Halo 2 AE, recently ported over to PC's Master Chief Collection
Added effects/visuals
Framerate
Scalability
Hitches
Fortunes have been mixed with the PC conversions of Halo Reach and Halo: Combat Evolved - so how does the latest release fare? Alex Battaglia revisits Halo 2, the Anniversary Edition improvements and rates the technical proficiency of this new PC port.
Halo 2 on PC is the best Master Chief Collection port yet
A mere 13 years on from its initial release, Halo 2 has been re-released on PC as part of The Master Chief Collection -…
www.eurogamer.net
Added effects/visuals
Saber Interactive give directional lighting a huge push with real-time shadow maps, while generally increasing the contrast across the entire image. Also helping is the use of screen-space ambient occlusion to give shadowed areas more diversity, while the Anniversary graphics also use baked light maps that include global illumination. On top of this, other effects are added - like parallax occlusion mapped textures that give the ground and wall surfaces more detail, or parallax mapped bullet decals when you shoot ballistic weapons at metal walls. On top of the generally more vibrant colours scheme, there are also some really nice lens flares from the sun or plasma effects, along with impressive particle effects that receive lighting and shadowing information. Where the original Halo 2 felt a little flat, the Anniversary edition adds vibrancy and consistency
Framerate
High frame-rate gaming is an essential feature, especially for an FPS. Halo: Combat Evolved supported frame-rates above 60fps with some screen elements like screen-shakes, antennae movement and plasma shots only animating at half-rate 30fps. Meanwhile, Halo Reach had a completely broken high frame-rate option where 120fps looked and felt worse than 60fps, with obvious pacing problems in mouse movement and animation. Looking back it really was dreadful. Halo 2 is a big improvement but it isn't quite perfect.
Scalability
Performance-wise, Halo 2 checks out just fine, as you would hope. Mainstream GPUs like Nvidia's GTX 1060 and AMD's RX 580 deliver decent 1440p experiences when the Anniversary graphics are active and by our reckoning, cards like GTX 1660 Super or GTX 1070 would be needed for similar 4K play. In common with prior Master Chief games, PC users can also enjoy enhanced visual settings that go beyond what the title delivers on Xbox One and Xbox One X.
Hitches
One aspect of performance does baffle me though: while playing cooperatively with a friend, I noticed some odd hitching on the Delta Halo level. I had observed one or two hitches prior to that, but here, the game was constantly stuttering for prolonged periods of time, while my co-op partner had the exact same thing happening in their game as well. Thinking it might be a network issue, I double-checked on another PC and the same effect kicked in with a similar level of severity. It's not a pretty sight - we're dealing with 100ms, 200ms and even 400ms stutters in relatively rapid succession. The game genuinely felt pretty poor to play in such areas and differences in hardware did not seem to matter: the issue kicked in on Ryzen 9 and Core i5 systems, and I also checked using both NVMe and SATA SSDs which were both equally impacted.
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