Here is Halo 3 running in the latest version of the Xbox 360 emulator, Xenia, under DirectX 12

DSOGaming writes: "YouTube’s ‘John GodGames Emus’ has shared a new video, showing Halo 3 running on the latest version of the Xbox 360 emulator, Xenia. As we can see, the team behind this emulator has made some progress and addressed some graphical glitches."

[TeamIcoFan]

Well it's definitely running better than the PS3 emulator, which isn't so much running as it is crawling on all fours.

[Mikedzines]

Such a great looking game for it's time.

[ProjectVulcan]

I felt it looked pretty poor. 2007 had some great looking games, and Halo 3's engine focused on the lighting at the detriment of pretty much all else.

It had nice art, but the image quality meant the screen was filled with aliasing. It only ran 640p with zero anti aliasing and no anisotropic filtering. Jaggies everywhere, smeary flat textures.

The MCC version goes to 1080p native and adds some FXAA which helps a lot, but doesn't add AF. It's much better but still not quite there. Maybe a PC emulator can fix all of this.

When 343 rebuilt the engine to run Halo 4, it looked amazing for X360. It's incredible comparing the two games first hand running on the same hardware. Halo 4 looked far better, although Halo 3 was the better game.

[Vegamyster]

Halo 3 had great physics and massive battlegrounds that few games came close to back then, it wasn't just it's lighting. Other games from that year include CoD 4, Bioshock, Mass Effect ect, none of these games have aged that well visually. Halo 4 came out 5 years later with a bigger budget towards the end of the consoles lifespan, of course it looked better just like every other franchise.

[ProjectVulcan]

I suggest you go back and play those games you mention, they all looked better than Halo 3.

Most of the Unreal Engine 3 games looked better, that engine was extremely well optimised for X360. It was basically built for it, since Epic's main project at the time was Gears of War.

So Bioshock was gorgeous, Gears of War was amazing and Mass Effect stunning. COD4 ran 600p, BUT it had 2x MSAA and some texture filtering. It ended up looking better.

Halo 3 was a sub 720p, jaggy, blurry textured disappointment. I remember sitting down excited to play it on a brand new $2000 Samsung 1080p HDTV I had just bought and thinking this really isn't massively better looking than the PC version of Halo 2 that arrived earlier in 2007. But then I played that in native 1080p with MSAA.

People always view games in rose tinted glasses and forget how it ACTUALLY looked when they played it. It wasn't that good even compared to other games of the time.

Walking through the early forest stages the lighting was excellent, but the aliasing was truly terrible on the foliage.

I will direct you way back to Bungie's forums at the time, and topics like this : https://www.bungie.net/en/F... You probably played it on an SDTV like many people of that era, it hid the worst of the visual problems.