‘Halo 5’ Running A Steady 60 FPS At Gamescom On Three-Month Old Build

The performance of Halo 5: Guardians for the Xbox One is still a hot topic with previous concern about its shape at E3 in June and the decision to remove local split-screen play. The franchise shooter was featured at Gamescom this week and an analysis of gameplay footage shared by 343 Industries shows significant improvement.

Halo 5‘s resolution wasn’t locked at 1080p yet, when we last looked at footage from E3. Additionally, the framerate was not a steady 60 fps and dropped down almost to 40 fps during some action heavy sequences.

Digital Foundry performed an analysis of the Gamescom footage and found that the Halo 5 framerate was much improved.

“We had the chance to take another look at Halo 5 Guardians at this year’s Gamescom. Although different levels were shown compared to the E3 campaign reveal, overall performance does show a clear improvement – a state of affairs backed up by this collection of b-roll clips Microsoft released this week, with good clean performance marred only by a sub-optimal cut-scene at 00:29.”

The “sub-optimal cut-scene” showed Master Chief’s Blue Team walking into a room just as a Hunter forms and attempts to bash through a plate of glass. There’s no impact to gameplay in this section and actual gameplay from both the campaign and multiplayer sections of the analysis reveal a solid 60 fps.

Interestingly, this still isn’t the best that Halo 5 can look. The build presented at E3 is three-months-old according to 343 Industries Multiplayer Designer, Quinn DelHoyo.

@TheSimms It was good to see what the game from ~3 months ago looks like on the competitive stage. Don’t put too much stock in it though.

— Quinn DelHoyo (@quinndelhoyo) August 7, 2015

@TheAkxis @AfricanTwig @TheSimms Lot’s of improvements since then. — Quinn DelHoyo (@quinndelhoyo) August 7, 2015

For those not familiar, that’s pretty typical of game development and what’s shown during conferences. Development teams must lock down the code well ahead of time to test and debug as much as they can before show time. This means that there is approximately six months’ worth of improvement to Halo 5 that we have yet to see.

Is the lack of local split-screen a disappointment? For a series that made its bones in part because of the feature, absolutely. I’ve played every game in the series split-screen with my son and this will be the first we don’t play together. However, I’ve also worked in software development for 17 years and understand the pressure of resource allocation to meet the needs of development. It’s a tough decision and one that we can only hope works out for 343 Industries and Halo 5 in the end.

[Images via Halo Waypoint]