Gears of War 4 PC Performance Review

Conclusion

Gears of War 4 is a game that truly showcases what modern PC hardware is capable of, using the Unreal Engine 4 and the DirectX 12 API to create one of the most graphically impressive games that we have ever seen. With this comes some hefty PC requirements for steady framerates at Ultra settings, though it is worth noting that plenty of modern games offer much less graphical fidelity with much lower framerates when maxed out, making Gears of War 4 efficient and not just demanding.  

In our testing Gears of War 4 proved to be a very demanding title, requiring a GTX 1070 or above for solid 1440p gameplay that remains mostly above 60FPS, making us see exactly why this game is only bundled with Nvidia’s highest end GPUs. Thankfully, this game has lower graphical options to scale to lower end hardware, but only those with top of the range systems will be able to max this game out at 60+FPS and high in-game resolutions. 

It is clear that this game has been designed to be used With the Xbox One Project Scorpio for 4K 30FPS console gameplay in the future, with the game sporting 4K ready textures and a huge attention to detail in its environments. Today’s modern PC hardware is already capable of Project Scorpio’s performance levels, giving us some spectacular visuals and some super high-resolution textures long before console gamers can get access to it. 

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was easily one of the most disappointing PC games of recent years, but The Coalition has been able to turn things around, making Gears of War 4 one of the best PC releases of 2016 in terms of quality. The game’s graphical options menu is better than everything else that we have seen this year, with each option coming with detailed explanations on how much it will affect CPU performance, GPU performance or VRAM usage. This allows PC gamers to easily adjust the game to meet their framerate requirements on their current hardware, without the need for a long tinkering session. 

Graphically Gear of War 4 looks spectacular at Ultra settings, making this game one of the few which could actually justify a hardware upgrade. We need titles like Crysis or Gears of War 4 to push the development of PC graphics hardware forward, as right now some companies seem to be sitting on their hands. Cough, GTX 1080Ti, Cough.

PC gamers should aim top play this game at High settings at a minimum if they want a great visual experience, as this is where the visuals-to-performance trade-off is best. For those with high-end hardware Ultra settings is simply a feast for the eyes if you can run it at a stable framerate, making the visual upgrade more than worth it for enthusiast PC builders. 

Right now DirectX 12 has been a bit of a disappointment for most on PC, though Gears of War 4 really showcases what is possible if a game is made with DirectX 12 support in mind from the beginning, offering fantastic PC performance and breathtaking visuals from day one. 

Looking at Async Compute we can see that it does not have much of an impact on the performance of Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs and is not even an option on older Maxwell hardware. On AMD GCN and newer GPUs Async Compute offers a noteworthy performance increase, giving AMD GPUs that little bit of extra grunt to play this demanding new release. In the future, The Coalition plans on implementing DirectX 12 Multi-GPU support in a future patch, but for now, Gears of War 4 will only support single GPU setups.  

Gears of War 4 is an Unreal Engine 4 masterpiece and the first UWP game on the Windows 10 store that we would recommend to PC gamers If you want an action-packed cover based shooter with great visuals Gear of War 4 is the best game in town right now and is a great sign of what is to come if Microsoft gives the PC version of other Xbox Play Anywhere titles the game quality control.   

 

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