‘Halo 5’ Resolution Not Finalized, 1080p May Not Be Locked To Ensure 60 FPS

Halo 5: Guardians is going through the final phases of development ahead of its October 27 release on the Xbox One. 343 Industries has made clear that delivering 60 frames per second is the paramount goal in terms of the shooter’s performance, so much so that splitscreen co-op has been sacrificed. A 1080p resolution may end up being another casualty.

Gaming Bolt spoke with Halo 5 Lead Producer Chris Lee about the game’s technical performance. He confirmed that the game’s framerate will be 60 fps in both campaign and multiplayer. The resolution is a different story though.

“So, we’re still optimizing the game as we haven’t launched so we haven’t locked in our final resolution yet. But we will talk more about that in the future,” Lee explained.

The controversial eSRAM in the Xbox One was also asked, but Lee dismissed that as a source of any issues. No mention was made of any of the possibilities of DirectX 12 updates to the Xbox One later this year. However, the Xbox One already has many of the new features in its current version of DirectX 11.

The question over how Halo 5 will perform in the framerate and resolution department cropped up again, thanks to a Digital Foundry article analyzing game footage from E3. An analysis of the campaign and multiplayer footage revealed that the game did not run at a stable 60 fps and dipped almost all the way to 40 fps during heavy action sequences.

Additionally, multiplayer footage from The Road to E3 video for Halo 5 showed 343 Industries utilizing a dynamic resolution system to scale back the number of pixels used to keep the frame rate high (11:50 mark). The resolution starts at 1920×1080 but dips to 1920×810 with a minimum of 1152×810 observed in B-roll footage.

Of course, it’s important to remember that Halo 5 is not close to being finalized in the video provided. The E3 campaign demo was carefully crafted for Microsoft’s stage show while the multiplayer footage shows a game still in development.

343 Industries will spend the remaining three months leading up to Halo 5‘s launch optimizing the game’s performance. Digital Foundry’s analysis is a little premature in that regard, but the spotting of the dynamic resolution is possibly the key bit. We’ve seen the dynamic scaling technique used in Xbox One games over the past year such as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

[Images via Halo Waypoint]