One of the key features of The Master Chief Collection is its promised frame-rate - a full 60 frames per second across all four games. Replaying each of these games at 60fps has been a treat and thankfully, Halo 2 Anniversary manages to mostly deliver on this promise across all three engines. Not surprisingly, the campaign and multiplayer modes both handle slowdown completely differently though. Single-player has the odd torn frame manifesting at the very top of the screen, along with some dropped frames, but it's clear that lowering the resolution was the right move in the campaign as the end results are quite smooth. The same is true of the classic campaign, which manages to hold 60fps for the vast majority of the time. Surprisingly there are a few instances in which slowdown rears its head even in classic mode, leading us to once again conclude that utilising two renderers simultaneously is putting quite a strain on the system.
However, the updated multiplayer does not suffer from any screen-tear and instead uses a pure v-sync setup, in common with the Halo 4 conversion where the core tech hails from. Matchmaking wasn't enabled at the time of testing so we were limited to a smaller multiplayer match comprised of five players across all six of the new maps. Throughout the run of play the game does an exceptional job of maintaining a rock solid 60fps most of the time. Five of the maps pass muster with barely a blip but, unfortunately Zanzibar/Stonetown isn't quite as solid as we would like. With just five players on the map we encountered dips into the 50s (and sometimes lower) any time we were facing the central area with the large turbine. The drop in performance wasn't severe, but similar to Halo 4 on Xbox One, the game feels quite jerky and unresponsive when it does occur. Ultimately, while it's always disappointing to run across any frame-rate dips in a game, especially in multiplayer, the results are still very solid overall and it's safe to say that most users won't notice these issues. We're curious to see how Stonetown holds up with more players and we should have some additional information on that next week.