Halo 5 Guardian is one of the best first-person shooters of the year, and the constant 60-frames-per-second performance is a large reason the game feels so good to play. The game's developer, 343 Industries, prioritized frame rate over resolution, and Eurogamer's Digital Foundry goes into deep detail about how that was achieved in the above video.
It turns out it's quite the feat of engineering and optimization, and it's likely that other developers working on the Xbox One will be taking notes.
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"It's clear that hitting 1080p while maintaining 60fps would not have been possible in Halo 5 but rather than simply opting to render at a low resolution across the board, 343 has implemented one of the most impressive dynamic resolution scaling systems we've seen to date," the accompanying article states.
"In Halo 5, X and Y values are adjusted independently enabling a wide range of values designed to maximize performance. The lowest recorded value we find is 1152x810 but we see arbitrary values such as 1168x810, 1440x840, 1344x972, and 1536x1080 as well. Halo 5 is able to make these adjustments on the fly while avoiding over budget frames throughout, ensuring silky-smooth performance."
The rest of the article, and the video above, goes into impressive detail about the game's visuals and how they were achieved. The end result is a game that may have had to make some compromises when it comes to resolution, but the smoothness of the play more than makes up for it.
