I’ve been squirrelled away in the PC Gamer office all week testing Halo: Campaign Evolved on all manner of hardware, including a beastly rig with an RTX 5080 and Ryzen 7 7700X3D. To my surprise, the difference between Low and Ultra is incredibly subtle and, frankly, not worth the performance hit.
Across the majority of my testing, I saw the swap from Low to Ultra take a big bite of performance (around 20%). That may not be a huge deal at close to 200 fps, but in my RTX 4070 Super rig, that makes the difference between being able to run the game at a consistent 60 fps at 1440p with no upscaling.
Below, you can see the difference between Low and Ultra in the very first mission of the game. Other than the UI element up the top left, you’d be forgiven for assuming there is no difference between the two images.
I did spot a slightly bigger difference between Low and Ultra when you are sucked up into the spaceship on the third set of missions. Though blood textures look nearly identical, the light hits the gun every so slightly differently, and shadows are a tad softer on Ultra.