Halo Campaign Evolved: The Full PC Fix Guide
Halo Campaign Evolved runs noticeably blurrier and less stable on PC than it should, and almost every fix for that traces back to one file you have to create yourself.
None of this is exotic modding. It's config editing, the kind Unreal Engine 5 games have needed for years, and once the file exists, adding new fixes to it takes seconds. Worth doing before you sink hours into a Legendary run only to have the game crash on you mid-mission.
Setting Up the Engine.ini File
Everything below depends on one file existing in the right spot: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Meteorite\Saved\Config\Windows
If AppData isn't showing up in File Explorer, open the View tab and turn on hidden items first. That folder is hidden by default on most Windows installs, not a Halo-specific quirk.
Inside that Windows folder, create a new text document, paste in whatever config lines you're using from the sections below, then save it as Engine.ini (not Engine.ini.txt, so make sure the save dialog is set to "All Files" before naming it). Delete the leftover .txt file afterward so you're not left with two versions sitting in the same folder.
Last step, and the one people skip: right click Engine.ini, go to Properties, and check the box marked Read Only. This part isn't optional. Leave the file writable and the game overwrites or deletes your changes the next time it launches, silently, so you won't even get an error telling you what happened. You'll just boot up confused about why the blur is back.
Killing the Blur
Paste this into your Engine.ini:
[SystemSettings]
; Film grain
r.FilmGrain=0
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=0
; Chromatic aberration
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
; Extra cleanup
r.Tonemapper.Quality=0
; Mild Lumen denoising help
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.Temporal.MaxFramesAccumulated=12
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.Temporal.MaxFramesAccumulated=12The first two lines strip out film grain, which is doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the blur complaints in the first place. Chromatic aberration goes next, since that effect smears color at the edges of the screen and reads as blur even when the actual resolution is fine. The last two lines stretch out how many frames Lumen's temporal accumulation uses, which smooths out some of the smearing you get from Lumen's lighting system without fully disabling it.
Two more settings worth killing while you're in the menus rather than the ini file: Motion Blur and Screen Shake. Motion Blur adds to the same blurriness problem you're already fighting, and Screen Shake is cranked hard enough that The Pillar of Autumn's opening turns into a nauseating mess if you leave it on. Both live in the video settings menu, not the config file, so just scroll down and uncheck them directly.
Fixing Crashes and Frame Drops
If you're on an Nvidia card, there's a specific hotfix driver, version 610.82, that fixes both crashing and low frame rates in one install. It doesn't show up on Nvidia's website or in the Nvidia App through normal update channels, so you have to go find it manually. Here's where to grab it:
This clears up crashing for most people running Nvidia hardware. If you're still crashing after installing it, or if you're on AMD or Intel where this driver doesn't apply at all, Halo Waypoint's official known issues page has a running list of confirmed bugs and fixes specific to those situations. There are enough separate issues logged there that walking through them individually here would just be worse than the source itself.
One more visual bug worth flagging separately from the ini fixes: if you're running the latest official (non-hotfix) driver and start seeing a static, confetti-like pattern flickering across reflective surfaces, try bumping your reflection settings up to Ultra. That seems to clear it up, and you can drop other settings back down afterward if you need the frames elsewhere.
An Alternative Approach for Sharper Reflections
There's a second version of the Lumen fix floating around that trades a small performance hit for noticeably sharper reflections, specifically on Nvidia hardware. Instead of just easing Lumen's denoiser like the block above, this one disables it entirely and hands reflection reconstruction over to Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction instead:
r.FilmGrain=0
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=0
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
r.NGX.DLSS.denoisermode=1
r.Lumen.Reflections.BilateralFilter=0
r.Lumen.Reflections.ScreenSpaceReconstruction=0
r.lumen.Reflections.Temporal=0
r.Shadow.Denoiser=0Expect to lose somewhere around 7 to 12 frames per second running this version, which is a real cost, not a rounding error. Whether that's worth it depends entirely on how much headroom your GPU has to spare. If you're already frame-limited, stick with the standard blur fix above instead.
Worth knowing before you chase this one: some testers have reported that newer DLSS presets (specifically 4.5's L and M presets) already bake in their own reconstruction behavior, and disabling Lumen's denoiser on top of that has actually made reflections look worse in some cases rather than better, for reasons nobody's fully nailed down yet. Treat this fix as something to test on your own setup rather than something that's guaranteed to be an upgrade.
Fixing Crossplay Disconnects
Playing co-op with someone on console and getting dropped repeatedly? Cap your frame rate at 60. That single change has resolved the disconnect issue for a decent number of PC and console mixed groups, even though there's no obvious reason an uncapped frame rate should be breaking cross-platform netcode in the first place.
Optional: Killing Input Lag
If the game feels sluggish to aim in even after your frame rate looks fine, add this block to the same Engine.ini file:
[/script/engine.inputsettings]
bEnableMouseSmoothing=False
bViewAccelerationEnabled=False
bDisableMouseAcceleration=TrueThis strips out mouse smoothing and acceleration entirely, which is usually the actual source of input feeling delayed or floaty rather than raw frame rate. Follow the same read-only routine as before: uncheck read-only, edit, save, then re-check read-only before you launch the game again, or the change won't stick.
Optional: Unlocking FOV and Fixing Weapon Offsets
Add this single line to Engine.ini to change how field of view gets calculated:
r.UseLegacyMaintainYFOVViewMatrix=TrueBy default, the game locks your vertical FOV and scales horizontal FOV off of it. Flip this to True and it works the other way, your horizontal FOV becomes the fixed value instead. In practice, that means a 90 FOV setting in-game now renders closer to 121 degrees horizontal, a meaningfully wider view, particularly useful on ultrawide monitors where the default scaling leaves the edges of the screen looking cramped.
Weapon positioning is a separate fix and it lives in a different file entirely, HaloGlobalGameUserSettings.ini, found under the same Config folder as Engine.ini but in the numbered subfolder tied to your specific save rather than the Windows folder. Around line 70 you'll find twelve values, all set to 0 by default:
MeleeWeaponOffsetHorizontal=0
MeleeWeaponOffsetVertical=0
MeleeWeaponOffsetDepth=0
PistolOffsetHorizontal=0
PistolOffsetVertical=0
PistolOffsetDepth=0
RifleOffsetHorizontal=0
RifleOffsetVertical=0
RifleOffsetDepth=0
HeavyWeaponOffsetHorizontal=0
HeavyWeaponOffsetVertical=0
HeavyWeaponOffsetDepth=0Adjusting these repositions where each weapon type sits on screen relative to your camera, useful if the wide FOV change above leaves your gun model looking oddly stretched or too close to the lens. Don't make this particular file read-only after editing it. Unlike Engine.ini, this one's meant to stay writable.
Does Any of This Cost You Achievements?
Worth addressing directly since it's a common concern. None of the fixes above touch difficulty, enemy behavior, or player traits, they're purely visual and input settings, which puts them in a different category entirely from the in-game difficulty modifier presets that do explicitly disable achievements. If you're chasing the full achievement list and want to know exactly which in-game settings actually put that at risk, our complete achievement roadmap covers what to avoid. Config file edits like the ones here sit outside that system entirely, so there's nothing here that should flag or block a legitimate completion run.
