[Hardware] Halo Infinite Benchmarked: Master Chief Eats Tons of VRAM

[#Hassan.]

6GB and even 8GB cards can struggle

Halo Infinite puts yet another major launch into the Xbox Series X/S library, and because it’s a first party title, Microsoft has also launched the game on PC. Naturally, we want to see how well Halo Infinite runs on the best graphics cards. We got a game code via AMD for testing purposes, as this is an AMD-promoted game. Sadly, that code was for the Microsoft Store — still the most user unfriendly experience of all the major distribution platforms. That does enable Play Anywhere support for Xbox and PC, but personally I'd rather have the game on Steam. However, that's all beside the point. We wrote recently about what makes for a good game benchmark, and why built-in benchmarks are so helpful for those who want to check performance. Halo Infinite sadly doesn't include a benchmark mode, which means manual testing while capturing frametimes using OCAT. Our test sequence uses one of the first outdoor areas of the game, cleared of enemies so that we can simply run the same route each time without the threat of dying. Note that performance can be quite a bit higher in other areas of the game, but it can also be lower in multiplayer mode, especially in the midst of a large firefight. One thing that quickly became clear during our testing is that Halo Infinite using the ultra graphics preset can eat a lot of video memory. While you might be able to get by with 6GB at 1080p ultra, you'll get a better experience by dropping a few settings down a notch — to the point where the game indicates it's not using substantially more than 6GB. We'll run through the best settings to tweak further down the page, but let's start with the head-to-head AMD and Nvidia GPU benchmarks.

Halo Infinite Test Hardware

This might just be the last game where we use our three-year-old GPU testbed — we're looking at upgrading to a Core i9-12900K in the near future, along with Windows 11. The Core i9-9900K may be a bit of a bottleneck at lower resolutions, but as we've seen repeatedly, 1440p and 4K testing usually pushes the bottleneck back to the graphics card. As noted above, Halo Infinite is an AMD-promoted game, which means the devs may have received some help from AMD in tuning and optimizing the engine. That's probably also why it uses a lot of VRAM, since AMD's latest RDNA 2 GPUs typically have more memory than their Nvidia counterparts — except at the RTX 3060 and RX 6600 XT level. It's also a DirectX 12 exclusive, which often means AMD's GPU architectures run a bit better than Nvidia's, unless the developers put in a lot of extra effort tuning for the various GPUs. We're using AMD's 21.12.1 drivers, which came out just a few days ago and specifically mention Halo Infinite optimizations. For Nvidia, we're using the latest 497.09 drivers that are also Game Ready for Halo Infinite. We've tested with the public release of the game, with any patches applied, so right now this is what others should experience. Of course, the test sequence and other hardware can and will impact performance, but there's not much to be done about that. Halo Infinite PC Performance at 1080p

We'll start with the easiest of our test settings, 1080p at ultra quality. Except, we're using a PC with a 4K monitor, and at least the Microsoft Store version of the game doesn't include resolution options. You can run in borderless window (desktop resolution) or windowed mode. Technically we could change the desktop resolution before launching the game, but that makes everything take longer so we just used the built-in resolution scaling slider and set it to 50% — we'll look at "native" 1080p performance when we get to the settings analysis below. At 1080p (4K with 50% scaling), Halo Infinite indicates it uses 7.11GB of video memory. Obviously, that could present a bit of a problem for some of the GPUs, and under lengthier play sessions, or when Alt+tabbing out of the game and back, or even when tweaking settings, we encountered some anomalies. Restarting the game usually fixed the problem, but even the 8GB RX 6600 XT was prone to slowdowns over time when using the ultra preset — though Nvidia's RTX 2060 didn't seem to have any such difficulties. It could be that AMD just needs to tweak some things in its drivers to improve memory utilization.

Link:  https://www.tomshardware.com/features/halo-infinite-benchmarked-master-chief-eats-tons-of-vram