Gears of War: Ultimate Edition – PC Launch Disaster

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition – PC Launch Disaster

 

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition has just launched on PC as a Windows 10 Store Exclusive, with the game being released without any prior warning and is being claimed by many as one of the largest launch disasters of recent history. 

Right now the game will costs $29.99 on the Windows 10 Store, or £22.79 here in the UK, exclusively on the Microsoft Store App on Windows 10.

At the time of writing I simply cannot recommend that anyone purchases this title given the currently available information, as all current reports on the game are terrible, with both AMD and Nvidia users reporting problems and reports of heavy artifacting and even reports of G-Sync not functioning. 

Below is some footage of the games built in benchmark running on an R9 Fury GPU at 1440p high settings, showing horrible performance and visual artifacting. 

 

 

Over the past number of weeks reports have been coming in that games on the Windows 10 storefront would lack many PC specific features and deliver make it difficult for gamers to use Multi-GPU configurations and even doing simple things like turning V-Sync off. 

Right now looking at the current report from Forbes it looks like AMD GPUs are affected by a lot of performance problems, with Nvidia seemingly faring much better in the game, though Nvidia gamers will have issues when trying to use G-Sync, with Microsoft themselves recommending that Nvidia users turn G-Sync off for the best experience.  

Right now Gear of War Ultimate edition looks like it may even be worse than Batman Arkham: Knight when it originally launched on PC, which shows exactly how much Microsoft has messed up this release. 

We are currently doing our PC performance review on Far Cry Primal on PC, so we won’t be able to test Gear of War: Ultimate Edition until later in the day, but we will try our best to deliver our readers performance data as soon as possible for Gears of War Ultimate Edition. 

 

Update: – As of now I can report that after 2 hours of trying and a 30 minute support call that the game is currently unavailable to download, with the majority of reviews of the game also reporting that the title will not download on their systems. 

When Speaking with a Microsoft representative all I was able to learn was that this is a known issue and that Microsoft staff are currently working on the problem, with the representative telling me to try to download the title again in a few days. 

As the first Microsoft Store and DX12 exclusive game this is a terrible showing from Microsoft, both shaking my faith that the Microsoft Store could be a good gaming platform and in Microsoft’s commitment to PC gaming in general. Hopefully Microsoft will be able to iron out these issues soon, as this is a ridiculous situation.  

 

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