Digital Foundry vs the Halo 5 Gamescom demo

[Administrator]

After surviving the difficult months following the release of Halo: the Master Chief Collection, 343 Industries is just about ready to unleash Halo 5 - the first full-blooded new-gen outing for the franchise. In addition to a revamped multiplayer, the campaign's set to last twice as long as its predecessor, with missions spread across three worlds built on an entirely new graphics engine - so we could well be looking at the most dramatic change in series history. This is not the Halo you know and love, but this new creation still has a lot of potential, with 343i intent on winning over and expanding the series' dedicated fanbase. We were given a chance to check out the latest Halo 5 code behind closed doors this year at Gamescom and walked away impressed by what we saw.
While the E3 campaign reveal focused on the new Spartan - Locke - this new demo focuses instead on the exploits of the Master Chief and his 'Blue Team' as they blast through an Oni research station to retrieve an undisclosed piece of intel. As the second mission in the game, the level feels somewhat more claustrophobic than the E3 demo, yet there's still a surprising amount of freedom available to the player.
The action kicks off as the Chief and friends crash through a window, using thrusters to remain firmly attached to the ship interior as enemies are ejected into space. We had a seat right beside the TV where it was possible to observe the game at close proximity. Aliasing and shimmering are still visible but image quality in general looks like an improvement over the older E3 build. In fact, while we could not record the full demo, the b-roll footage available does indicate that a dynamically scaling framebuffer is in effect, adjusting resolution on the fly according to GPU load. Resolution is still pretty fluid, bottoming out at around 810 lines, while still managing to hit 1080p too (much more consistently in the multiplayer mode). 343i still maintains that a final resolution hasn't been selected, but even now the dynamic scaler works well enough, and we'd be happy to see it in the final shipping game.
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