[Ryan Miceli] had spent a few years poring over and reverse-engineering Halo 2 when a friend asked for a favor. His friend created an improved Xbox with significant overclocks, RAM upgrades, BIOS h…
The left is what the original looks like right as the cutscene switches to that scene. It only looks like that for a fraction of a second and then it renders correctly and looks like the image on the right. In the video, the guy mentions how he added a hard drive overclocking feature to make that pop in not happen or at the very least, significantly reduce it.
But yeah out of context that thumbnail is confusing.
The graphics were like that on the left due to the modded xboxes. The, upresing caused the textures to be weird which is why it looked like that. A large portion of the article is about then fixing this issue.
Combat Evolved didn’t look that bad either. That just looks like someone on PC put the graphics down as low as possible. Something you can’t even do on Xbox