Ray Tracing has arrived in Halo Infinite, but not the game’s campaign

Ray Traced Sun Shadows have arrived in Halo Infinite’s PC version, but only in multiplayer

Halo Infinite has received its Season 3 “Echoes Within” update, adding to the game a new battle pass, three new multiplayer maps, a new multiplayer game mode (Escalation Slayer), and a lot of other multiplayer focused updates. 

On PC, one of the headline features of Halo Infinite’s Season 3 update is the addition of Ray Traced Sun Shadows on PC, and if you thought that you would be able to enjoy Halo Infinite’s campaign with added ray tracing, you thought wrong. Ray Traced Sun Shadows is a multiplayer-only option for Halo Infinite. 

    Players on PC are now able to toggle Raytraced Sun Shadows from the Settings menu. When this feature is enabled, all shadows cast by the sun will appear more detailed in multiplayer gameplay. The Raytraced Sun Shadows option does not apply to the Halo Infinite Campaign. 

Honestly, ray tracing is, for the most part, a useless add-on for a multiplayer game. While they often look great, ray traced graphical effects often have a huge performance cost, and gamers have a competitive advantage when they are playing multiplayer games at a higher framerate. As such, it makes sense for most Halo Infinite players to play the game with ray tracing disabled. This makes Halo Infinite’s ray traced sun shadows a unnecessary option within Halo Infinite, because framerate is king within the world of competitive multiplayer.

Adding ray tracing to Halo Infinite’s campaign was likely a more challenging task than adding the effect as a multiplayer-only effect. Even so, it is disappointing that Halo Infinite players cannot enjoy Halo Infinite’s campaign with ray traced sun shadows enabled.

To enable ray traced sun shadows on PC, you will need a graphics card that is DXR Tier 1.1 compatible, which included AMD’s RX 6000 series and newer graphics cards and Nvidia’s RTX 2000 series or later GPUs. If your graphics card does not support ray tracing, Halo Infinite’s Ray Traced Sun Shadows option will be greyed out within the game’s video settings. 

You can join the discussion on Halo Infinite’s Ray Tracing being a multi-player only graphical option on the OC3D Forums.