Title is a little provocative, but I don’t mean for it to be. I mainly just want to shed light on what this possibly means for people who were excited about raytracing in Halo Infinite. Edit: This is the article I’m talking about: Halo Infinite’s Great Journey on PC | Halo Infinite | Halo - Official Site (halowaypoint.com)
Edit#2: I’m trying to be relatively company neutral while also not flipping over every desk in a 5 mile radius out of anger and disappointment, so hopefully I succeeded.
AMD partnerships are nothing new and it makes sense Microsoft/343i would partner with AMD, since AMD makes the CPU and GPU inside every Xbox since the Xbox One. I’m actually fine with a partnership as long as either party isn’t actively screwing the other over with things like limiting features, though I’m not sure AMD isn’t doing that. I’ve played quite a few of these AMD partnership titles and all of them have lackluster raytracing implementations and lack DLSS. Let’s list a few, Dirt 5, Far Cry 6, Resident Evil Village, and Godfall all lack DLSS while also having very restricted and low resolution raytracing features. Games that actually gain something from raytracing usually have a mixture of raytraced global illumination, raytraced shadows, raytraced reflections, and raytraced ambient occlusion WHILE giving resolution and surface application settings to the player. Games like Metro Exodus Enhanced, Minecraft, Control, and Cyberpunk do this to some degree while AMD’s titles lack the majority of those features and don’t allow players to get anywhere NEAR full resolution (even if you have the GPU power to do so). Why is this the case? Just look at the hardware and you’ll quickly find out AMD’s best GPUs are bested by low-mid end Nvidia GPUs in very heavy raytracing workloads, games like Minecraft for example see the 3060 TI ($400 USD) at 4K 18.8 FPS on average and the 6900 XT ($1000 USD) at 4K 15.1 FPS average. These numbers come from the RT focused section of Gamers Nexus’ 6900 XT review: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU Review & Benchmarks: Undervolting, Gaming, Power, Noise - YouTube
The point is simple then, when raytracing is the bottleneck, Nvidia is around 2x faster at the same tier of GPU before upscaling tricks. AMD seems to hide behind weak implementations to disguise this fact, and I hope Halo Infinite doesn’t fall prey to the same fate as other AMD titles.
My message to Microsoft/343i/AMD is simple, please allow fully fledged raytracing features in Halo Infinite, allow players to customize how heavy these features are ourselves with solid preset options for players who can’t be bothered to adjust them, and please allow DLSS. DLSS is superior to FSR for RTX GPU owners which, according to Steam, is 18-20% of PC players.
My final thing to say is just how crushing this news is as a nerd, I love watching graphics move forward but I’ve seen too many games be crippled by lackluster implementations to be excited about Halo Infinite from a graphical standpoint anymore. I just wish every studio would do what 4A Games did with Metro Exodus Enhanced.