It's been a long wait but Halo: The Master Chief Collection is finally coming to PC. At X019 last week, Microsoft confirmed that the planned episodic roll-out of the collection is set to kick off on December 3rd with the arrival of Halo: Reach. We went hands-on with the port at the event, grabbed a bunch of capture and dug deep into the settings menus. We also spotted the intriguing addition of an 'enhanced mode' that uses the extra power of modern hardware to further upgrade the Reach experience beyond resolution and frame-rate alone.
System requirements for Reach are slight to say the least - which is perhaps not surprising when you bear in mind that the original game launched just over nine years ago for Xbox 360. 343 Industries says that an Nvidia GTX 770 (pretty much on par with a GTX 680 or GTX 960) is good enough to deliver 60 frames per second at 4K resolution - and you can get an idea of what that experience looks like by taking a look at the video embedded on this page.
Based on our playtest of the PC game, 343 Industries has stuck to the Master Chief Collection template established by the Xbox One compilation. New assets - if any - are thin on the ground: this is effectively the original Reach, liberated from the 1152x720 resolution of the Xbox 360 game. That's absolutely fine as despite being mastered to last-gen standards, the art design still holds up beautifully today. Performance-wise, the original release had some issues maintaining its 30fps target frame-rate - a situation resolved by the revamped Xbox One back-compat rendition of the game. Obviously though, PC goes much further: at X019, the game ran very smoothly at 60fps and it'll be interesting to see if the port can be unlocked to run faster still.
