With most games, there are certain things you can change, depending on your setup, to  improve your experience. However, this game is a bit different. The truth is that Halo Infinite doesn’t run very well if you have most of these turned to their highest setting. It is a computationally complex game, and requires a lot to function properly. In fact, I left out about 10 settings because nearly everyone tells you to put them at their lowest setting, or turn them off if possible, regardless of your setup. Personally, I increased my GPU from a 3060 to a 4070, and I still need to run most of these settings on low to achieve the best performance possible. In summation, it’s all about keeping this budget bar as low as possible, while still having your game look good. But, for those that want to push their VRAM usage to its limit, I’ll try my best to honor what would work for you as well.

Nice and low!

Geometry Quality

This setting controls the detail of geometry you see at certain distances.

Shout out to XLR8 for the screen grab!

Low end: Putting this on low will definitely help the game run smoother if you’ve got a lower end setup. It may cause things to be shadowed incorrectly.

Middle: You could set this to medium or high if your setup could handle it, and many rooms and objects will be shadowed properly

High end: If you have a God-like PC you can set this to Ultra.

Reflections

This, obviously, controls the clarity of in-game reflections.

Obviously, if I had something in my teeth, there's no way I would know.

Low end: Turn this all the way to off. Halo isn’t really a game in which you glean information from reflections off of walls and bodies of water. If you could, I’d be able to see myself in the reflection above!

Middle: I would run this from low to medium. If you like the cinematic quality and immersiveness of seeing reflections in game, but don’t have the technical budget to go any higher, this is your happy medium (haha, get it?).

High end: If you’ve got the most expensive PC in the world, go ahead and crank this up to high or ultra. It may come at the cost of performance issues, but if your PC is powerful and you want to immerse yourself in a game, frag yourself out! 

Volumetric Fog Quality

This determines the clarity of large patches of fog you may find on maps like in the image below.

Shout out to XLR8 for the screen grab!

Low end: Turn this off. Not only will the game run smoother, but the map clarity, when aiming down sights, and in general, will be greatly increased.

Middle: You could click it up to low or even medium if you like the immersion but don’t want to be completely blinded.

High end: If you have enough CPU budget, and want the complete challenge of sniping through thick patches of fog, turn this sucker up to high or even ultra.

Effects Quality

This controls the complexity of explosions and dynamic lights.

Shout out to XLR8 for the screen grab!

Low end: You could turn this all the way down and get better performance, but you may lose some weapon/equipment/armor effects that can give you cues in game. For example, if this setting is set to low, you wouldn’t be able to see the bolt of electricity shocking the spartan in the photo above.

Middle: I recommend doing this, because you’ll be able to see crucial effect cues without sacrificing too much in performance.

High end: I would do this if I had a really hard time seeing effects and want to be sure of exactly what enemies are doing the moment they start.

Flocking Quality

This setting is to do with flocks of birds, critters, and other animals you may see on different maps. 

Is he beautiful? Yes. Is he necessary? No.

Low end: If you want your game to run as smoothly as possible, you can turn this off. This may also be helpful if you’re somebody who gets distracted easily and would rather focus on game play. I know this chicken is super cute, but he may distract you from killing someone!

Middle: If you aren’t easily distracted, you could do low or medium.

High end: If you want to hear and see litters of tiny animals flutter away beneath your feet in the middle of an intense gunfight, then turn this all the way up to high or ultra.

Resolution Scale

This pertains to the 3D resolution as a percentage of the native resolution size of the window.

In this image, the resolution scale is turned down to the lowest percentage possible. Not bad, right?

Low end: Turn this all the way down to 72%. The quality of the image won’t be that noticeable compared to 100%

Middle: If you can spare the budget, you can go ahead and keep this somewhere around 85%.

High end: Keep this at 100%. You could super sample to as high as 200%, but the difference is essentially negligible.

Raytraced Sun Shadows

This setting traces rays of light from the following Light sources: Directional. Point. Spot.

Shout out to MxBenchmarkPC for the screenshot!

Low end: This isn’t a necessary feature, but can help with a bit more in-game clarity and help the game look better. I’ve played with this off for a while, and it looks just fine. 

Middle: Set it to medium if you’re getting poor shadow quality but can sacrifice the processing power.

High end: Set to high to get the clearest image of shadows.

Simulation Quality

This is another one that should be put on the highest setting your PC can handle without the game crashing.

Please enjoy this photo of me getting my head blown off.

In a blog published by 343 Studios, they said “...all PC players set Simulation Quality to Ultra in the settings… it controls the amount of time we give to our system that corrects determinism errors on the client.” In short, this will help with smooth out gameplay and help, but not fix, some glitchy moments you may have.

Animation Quality

This controls the quality and smoothness of character animations. 

Careful! She's shooting right at you!

Regardless of your setup, you need to run this on max. It is crucial to see what an enemy is physically doing as you’re engaging them. The only other setting is auto, which will just make the game seem clunkier if you set it to this.

Borderless Fullscreen

This one is up to you, but I feel like it would be pretty annoying to see my task bar here while I was grinding.

See, if I had this visible while playing, I'd be forced to check my discord messages. Who knows what I have waiting for me behind that deadly, red circle.

It basically asks you whether you want Infinite to run in a window that’s the size of your monitor, or one that you can resize as if it were a Google Chrome window. Regardless of your PC, you should run it as a borderless full screen just to avoid accidentally clicking out of the game while you’re in mid gun fight.

Min and Max Frame Rate

There really is no reason why you’d want to put anything other than the maximum refresh rate of your monitor in these values.

I find that it's easier to skewer incoming banshees on a higher fram rate.

To do this, you’ll need to go into your display settings and check the refresh rate of your monitor, and set it to that. This, in tandem with the rest of your settings, will allow it to run at a consistent and acceptable frame rate, regardless of how tricked out your PC is.

ASYNC Compute

This, regardless of the cost of your setup, depends on your brand of GPU.

Smooth gameplay = Ghost grapplejacks.

Youtube content creator XLR8 says to use this if you have an AMD GPU, and not if you have an NVIDIA GPU. In short, the important thing to know is that most of the time, when this is enabled, there is a reduction of frames per second.

Sharpness

This setting allows you to control how crisp your game looks.

Sharp image obviously leads to sharp aim!

This, XLR8 also explains, is something that should be turned to 100% regardless of your setup. He compared turning Infinite’s sharpness up to watching the NFL channel, and turning your tv’s sharpness up. It doesn’t change what the football players are doing, it just makes it easier to see!.

FPS Counter/Network Statistics

While this one is seemingly simple, it’s actually very crucial to have this on.

144 frames of goodness per second.

It allows you to finely calculate your settings in game and figure out what works best for your setup. Being able to actively see your FPS and your ping is crucial to finding out what works the best for you.

You may also be interested in:

• Is Halo Infinite Good?
• Halo Infinite Difficulty Levels Explained
• Halo Infinite Best Controller Settings