The Master Chief Collection for PC adds another classic game to its ranks - and the arrival of Halo 3 brings with it terrific performance, the best support yet for high refresh rate gaming and even some nice enhancements to existing games in the collection. Beyond the fact that a genuinely great game is now available to PC gamers, what I particularly like about this release is that running it at 4K 60fps actually gave me a much better appreciation of some of the original game's technical achievements - elements that were hard to spot in the sub-720p Xbox 360 original.
While I definitely recall Halo 3's visual blemishes - like its character modelling and some of its choices for animation, sound, and lighting technology - seeing the game again at higher resolution and frame-rate serves to liberate the original assets from Xbox 360's technical limitations. While the console lacked substantial system RAM - certainly by today's standards - Bungie worked around this by using a lot of decals and tiling detail textures on a lot of the game's asset. On today's PC hardware running at 4K resolution, a lot of fine detail you may have missed is resolved - the scratches on metal, for example, or the highly detailed ground textures. On close inspection, I was even surprised to find that Halo 3 very rarely uses a form of offset bump mapping or rudimentary parallax mapping on some textures. It was all there back in 2007, just hidden behind low resolution and murky anisotropic filtering - something that is not an issue for today's technology.
There are some proper upgrades in this new release too - such as a field of view slider and an enhanced graphics option that delivers visuals in excess of the Xbox One version of the game. Halo 3 doesn't get a full-on remaster like its predecessors in the Master Chief Collection, but similar to the other PC ports you can push out the draw distance of static and dynamic world objects. Dynamic models like enemy corpses or smaller objects render out further into the distance away from the camera. This applies to elements like grass as well, but even the standard original distance for grass is not exactly bad. Below the original graphical option, you have a performance mode as well, which further reduces the distance of draw to levels very close to the camera - useful if you have a particularly old PC.