Disclaimer: I don’t want to bash 343i and Halo Infinite, but I want to share some of the things I’ve found through my troubleshooting over the course of the public release.
Halo Community,
I want to speak on the stability of Halo Infinite in terms of game performance and some of the things I have found while messing with my entire gaming setup. This includes different in-game settings, PC settings, Xbox Series X, and internet settings. My PC specs can be found in this image: https://imgur.com/LWREgep
Frames Per Second
One of the things that I have noticed is that the PC version of Halo Infinite becomes unstable at 120fps and above. There are several ways to notice the instability (other than crashes), but the easiest way to notice is with controller vibration turned on. Controller vibration will be very inconsistent at 120fps and above. Whether it is full vibration or nonexistent is almost random when playing the game. I’ve capped my framerate at 118fps to prevent it from reaching 120fps (through FPS spikes) and it fixed a lot of issues. Other handful of issues that I have noticed with 120+fps are likely what everyone else has seen. Game crashes, desync issues, phasing, visual glitches and etc.
Netcoding / Servers / Tick Rate
For those unaware, the Azure servers are the same servers that Microsoft uses for their cloud service and business affiliates/customers. Halo also uses these servers. IMO, the Microsoft Azure servers are probably one of the most inconsistent servers in gaming that I have played on. One moment they are amazing and the next they are the worst. These moments change almost hourly. You can check the latency to the servers by Googling “Azure Latency Test” and heading to AzureSpeed.com. The dream solution for this is to have dedicated servers for only Halo games.
As 343i has confirmed, the tickrate in 4v4 multiplayer matchmaking is set to 60, and the tickrate in theatre, BTB, and campaign is set to 30. Personally, I feel this is a fairly large issue for a game that is trying to have a successful competitive scene. Higher tick rate is always preferable and even more when the game is incapable of operating LAN without connecting to a server. The one thing that 343i must address is when the server switches from 60 tickrate to 30 tickrate. I’d love to see these questions answered below:
- What is the tickrate in custom games?
- What is the maximum amount of players that can be on a 60 tickrate server?
- Do spectators count towards the amount of players within a game?
i.e. Will one or two spectators to a 4v4 custom game switch the server to 30tickrate? [10ppl]
One last thing to mention on the servers is that they degrade in quality the longer you play the game. The quality drop is noticeable if you fail to restart your game from time to time and it is even worse when playing very long custom games. I’ve spent an hour or so in games with friends trying to study the map, mechanics and etc. The registration of your bullets/shots, movement and etc. degrades from the first minute to the 60 minute gradually.
Overall, I’ve made a significant upgrade by switching my ISP to a fiber internet connection. My latency/ping has dropped and made the game feel more bearable. There is still desync that I feel is primarily due to the tickrate, but not as much as before.
Graphics Quality
It is no secret that this game demands a lot on PC. Admittedly, there have been improvements since the initial public release but they are still bad enough on PC to cause crashes, bugs and overall performance issues. I’ve fiddled around with too many settings to list, but the most stable settings I was able to configure was to place everything on low settings except for animation quality (Ultra) and simulation quality (Ultra). The last two being ultra as you want to be able to see spartan character movements. The next thing to do is play the game on 1080p with 71% resolution scale. These settings provided the least amount of tax to my PC performance and prevented crashing/stability issues.
Season 2 UPDATE
I’ve played about an hour or two of Season 2 and needed to step away from the game due to a massive amount of frustration. There are a few things that were upsetting, but the primary ones would be the inability to toggle off speedlines and the weapon jamming. Weapon jamming is in reference to reports that player’s battle rifles or guns are failing to shoot periodically.
If you are unaware, a lot of the preset settings in Halo Infinite require you to toggle them on/off at the start of the game in order for them to take effect. For example, I typically play with speedlines off. When I load up Halo Infinite, they are on by default regardless of whether or not I had them set to off last time I played. I must select it ON and then OFF to remove them. There are similar problems with look sens, graphics quality items and etc. In this most recent update, it is not possible on PC; however, it is possible on Xbox Series X.
Weapon jamming had me on full tilt yesterday. I spent a small amount of time playing around with the various trigger deadzone settings, switching controllers, turning on/off my trigger stops and etc but there was no luck. The problem was so frequent that I became suprised when it didn’t happen in battles. Normally I would try to sit down and troubleshoot these issues like I did with trying to find the perfect move/look sensitivities, but I’m just broken at this point. My patience is worn thin. I won’t be playing until this is patched.
Overall Performance Tips
I wanted to mention a few tips/tricks that I found on the PC version to help others.
- The Microsoft Store version is more stable than the Steam version
- Always run the game in Admin Mode
- Keep Task Manager Open
To wrap this up:
I am tired of jumping through hoops in order to make Halo Infinite a stable game. I feel like this game is probably the best 343i game thus far and has so much potential, but that potential won’t be fulfilled for a few more years.
- M2
. I’m going to stop playing on PC, and stick to my series X till they patch it I guess…