Optimizing Halo: Campaign Evolved

May 2025, November 2025

Optimizing an icon

Visual Quality and Performance Improvements

I did a lot of scalability quality comparisons during these studio engagements. One of the possible visual improvements is separable motion blur. It would perform roughly the same if set to 0.66 scale and have it target FPS.

Max draw distance, max distance fade range, and max shadow distances were also unset and I recommended that the team do a pass on these. As a part of this, I suggested putting a cull distance volume into the levels where it makes sense.

Foliage

I also shared a Houdini tool to convert foliage to opaque. The foliage (including grass) were masked and this was causing them all to show up in unique raster bins and incurring a higher virtual shadow map cost. Having the foliage opaque removes them from needing unique raster bins.

The tool takes assets with masked materials and cuts the geometry around the alpha. This preserves the visual appearance without the cost of the overdraw from the alpha, or the raster bin costs.

There are many levels with dense foliage, be it ground or trees, and would affect those levels greatly.