Halo Infinite uses a brand-new DirectX 12 engine called "Slipstream," which is optimized for the large open-world environments that are introduced with this sixth Halo title. Take a look at our screenshots, the world looks richly detailed and is well-crafted. The models of major characters and weapons are topnotch, secondary geometry is fairly poor, though. Thanks to an automatically installed high-resolution texture pack, the surfaces are super-detailed and remain sharp even when you walk up to them. The high-resolution texture pack is a DLC component, so it can be uninstalled if you want to save on disk space or VRAM. We had it installed and enabled for all our testing in this article.

Indoor environments are fairly bland, though, and definitely look dated. Overall, the graphics are nice, comparable to many Unreal Engine titles, but certainly not "next-gen." Even though it's a title published by Microsoft, there's no DirectX 12 Ultimate—no ray tracing, no variable rate shading and no support for DLSS or FSR. According to the developer, support for ray tracing will be added in a future patch, there's no additional details available on which RT effects will be included. The game does have screen-space reflections (SSR), which look reasonably well and are placed in just the right spots, without looking like the "reflections spam" we've seen in some other games.

Unlike many Unreal Engine titles, there's almost no pop-in as you move through the open world—very nice. View distance and LOD are tuned very well to achieve nice visuals, but that does come with a performance hit. Our benchmark scene is not on the first level, which is an indoors space ship environment, but the open-world area, which is considerably more demanding in terms of hardware requirements. For 1080p 60 FPS performance, you'll need a GeForce RTX 3060, Radeon RX 6600 non-XT, or Radeon RX 5700 XT. Fluid 1440p can be achieved with the RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT, and for 4K60, you'll need a Radeon RX 6800 XT or Radeon RX 6900 XT. Not a single card from NVIDIA can achieve 60 FPS at 4K—the mighty RTX 3090 runs slightly below that: 58.9 FPS. Looking at our benchmark results, it is immediately clear that Halo Infinite is a much better match for AMD graphics hardware, possibly because the Xbox game consoles are based on AMD technology and the developer has optimized the game for this platform.

I find it surprising that NVIDIA Ampere cards run worse than the older Turing architecture, compared to the numbers we're usually seeing in other reviews. On AMD, the opposite is true: RDNA 2 runs best, followed by RDNA and the older architectures. We did use the latest drivers for all testing. Both AMD and NVIDIA have released game-ready drivers for Halo Infinite. Overall, given the visual quality delivered, I'd say Halo Infinite isn't that well optimized—other engines, like Unreal, definitely do better here.

With around 8 GB VRAM used in 4K, the title has reasonable memory requirements, a 10 GB RTX 3080 will be fine. At 1440p, you should definitely have 6 GB VRAM, though, as well as 1080p. That's at highest settings; options to adjust VRAM usage and hardware requirements are aplenty. A total of 17 settings let you dial down specific visuals. What's also worth mentioning is that a "simulation quality" setting exists, which you can use to reduce the CPU requirements of Halo if CPU bottlenecked—what a great idea.