So one of the things 343 has been really talking up has been ultrawide support. I play on a triple monitor NVSurround setup at 7680x1440 running off an RTX 2080 Ti and a Ryzen 9 3950X. I was extremely excited by their focus on ultrawide, as their previous implementation in MCC PC (while not without its flaws) was pretty great, and Halo on a triple monitor rig is downright amazing. After playing for about 3 hours, They’ve got some of it right, but there are definitely some major issues that need fixed. I’ll start with the good stuff:
- There’s minimal distortion on the extreme edges of the screen, unlike a lot of other titles.
- While my framerate is pretty poor (juddery 35-40FPS) even at low settings at native resolution, enabling the adaptive resolution resulted in an image quality drop that was pretty hard to notice, while keeping it at a rock solid 60FPS. I could potentially set a higher minimum framerate, but I’ve already given up about all the quality I want to lol.
- The UI elements in the main menu are constrained to a 16x9 space at the center of the screen, meaning that every button I need to click is on my middle monitor.
- MOST HUD elements are also correctly positioned within the 16x9 “middle monitor” space (I’ll get back to that in a second).
The problems:
- The customization menu is almost completely unusable, due to the fact that the scene scales based on the horizontal resolution. As a result, you can only see a very narrow 16x3 slice of your character (i.e. when customizing my helmet, I can only barely see the chin, and not the rest of the helmet, because the screen is so “zoomed in”). In the weapon customization, the entire top half of the weapon is completely cut off. This is not an issue in the main menu background, only the customization screen.
- This same issue applies to most of the pre- and post-match “cutscenes”, although I’ve had a few (maybe 2% or 3% of the time) which did scale correctly. The spectator camera also seems to have this issue.
- Both the motion tracker and the ammo counter are located at the extreme edges of the screen, with no feasible way to reposition them. While this might not be an issue for someone playing on a 21x9 monitor, it makes them completely unusable on a 48x9 setup, as they are actually completely outside my field of vision, and require me to physically turn my head in order to see them even in my peripheral vision. There is an option to apply a horizontal offset that will bring them onto my middle monitor where they belong, but it does not move the HUD elements, it compresses them - and I have to apply an offset of over 70% in order to get it where it needs to be, resulting in an almost unusable vertical stretch to all HUD elements, and makes the reticle completely disappear. For now, I’m just playing without using them (so glad they put ammo counters on almost everything), but whether it’s a “16x9 HUD” toggle or a better horizontal offset system (or custom positioning of each HUD element), this needs to be fixed. I don’t even think this would be usable on a 32x9 monitor, much less a surround setup.
Overall, it’s a fairly good start, although I’m somewhat confused as to why half the game seems to be built to support ultrawide, and the other half acts like a bad letterbox. I’m 100% sure 343 is aware of that issue and will fix it before launch, though. I’m not so sure they considered the implications of the HUD positioning, as those out-of-position elements are also at the extreme edges of the screen in all their ultrawide screenshots. This isn’t a gamebreaker for me, as I’m completely capable of disabling Surround and playing on a single 16x9 monitor should this not get fixed (although that wouldn’t be ideal), but triple Surround is kind of an edge case. Most ultrawide gamers are playing on single dedicated monitors that can cost up to $3000, and would have to create a custom resolution or force a 16x9 or 21x9 resolution in order to play the game should they not be able to see half the HUD, potentially messing up other system configurations in the process.
I’ll keep playing, and try to get some screenshots uploaded to showcase what’s working and what isn’t.