Even the RTX 5090 Struggles With Halo's UE5 Remake

Ninety to 100 frames per second. That's what an RTX 5090, the most powerful consumer GPU money can buy, manages to push in Halo: Campaign Evolved at 1440p Ultra with DLAA enabled. Not 4K. Not with ray tracing cranked beyond what the game already demands. Just 1440p, no upscaling, on a system also running an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 3D. Content creator Jackfrags shared the numbers in a preview build video, and they paint a picture that should worry anyone planning to play this on PC hardware that costs less than a mortgage payment.

To be clear, the game only hits 120 FPS in closed interiors. Open environments, the ones Halo is actually famous for, sit firmly in the 90-100 range. On a £2,000 GPU. I've been covering UE5 performance issues across multiple games now, and this is becoming a pattern that Epic and the studios using its engine need to reckon with. Stalker 2, Indiana Jones, and now Halo. The engine produces gorgeous results, but the performance cost is consistently brutal, and it's the players with mid-range hardware who suffer most.

What About Console?

The contrast with Xbox Series X is actually striking. Digital Foundry's analysis of the console build paints a much more stable picture. Performance mode locks at 60 FPS using dynamic resolution scaling that averages around 50-75% of the output resolution, often landing around 1080p. It uses hardware ray tracing and what Digital Foundry describes as a clever translucency pass that adjusts the resolution of transparent effects based on frame budget. The result is a locked 60 FPS that holds up even during heavy combat. A Quality Mode will also ship with the final release, though it wasn't available for testing.

Handheld is a different story entirely. The ROG Xbox Ally X manages 30-40 FPS on Very Low settings, and Digital Foundry speculates the Steam Deck is unlikely to hold a stable 30. Xbox Series S, meanwhile, was described as "technically playable but we were told it wasn't ready yet." With the game launching on July 28 and early access starting July 23, that's cutting it close.

The official system requirements list an RTX 4080 and 32 GB of RAM for 4K at 60 FPS on Ultra, but given what the 5090 is doing at 1440p without upscaling, those numbers almost certainly assume aggressive DLSS, FSR, or XeSS upscaling to hit that target. Anyone running a 4070 or below should expect to lean heavily on frame generation and reduced settings. I'd bet a significant chunk of the PC player base will be running this at medium with DLSS Quality just to stay above 60.

Former Bungie veteran Niles Sankey has also flagged a concern beyond raw performance: tactical readability. The visual density that Lumen and Nanite produce can make it harder to track enemies and projectiles in fast combat, which was one of the original game's greatest strengths. It's a subtler problem than frame rate, but potentially just as damaging to how the game actually feels to play.

What makes all of this frustrating is that the game itself sounds excellent. Previews from journalists who played the demo have been overwhelmingly positive, praising the AI, the sound design, and how faithfully the levels have been recreated. I wrote about the Halo trailer being pulled from PlayStation's State of Play earlier, and the hype around this remake is clearly real. The $200 Collector's Edition sold out almost immediately. But none of that goodwill matters if half the PC audience can't run the thing properly at launch.

Halo Studios still has seven weeks before the July 28 release to optimise, and preview builds are never final code. But UE5's track record with PC performance at launch is not encouraging. The engine's new Lumen mode in UE5.8 targets 60 FPS on low-spec hardware, but Campaign Evolved is shipping on an older version and won't benefit from those improvements. If the final build ships with performance this demanding, PC players without top-tier hardware are going to need a lot of patience and a lot of upscaling to enjoy what everyone agrees looks like a fantastic remake.