Gears of War: Ultimate Edition PC Performance Retest with AMD Crimson 16.3 Drivers

Conclusion

When Gear of War: Ultimate Edition was launched on PC we slammed it for having terrible support for modern AMD GPUs, with AMD parts getting nowhere near the performance of Nvidia’s similarly priced GPUs. Now thanks to a few updates and a driver update from AMD things have changed, but sadly not enough to level the playing field.

AMD GPUs still run terrible in this game, but they have now moved to much more passable levels of performance, lacking their previous artifacting issues and with much higher minimum framerate performance.   

At best Gear of War: Ultimate Edition’s performance on AMD can be called passable, but Nvidia still remains the performance leader, though this is unsurprising since this game is an Nvidia GameWorks title.

AMD’s latest GPU drivers say that the game will have up to a 60% performance boost on the R9 Fury X and up to a 44% boost on the R9 380, you can see from our testing that these claims do not really hold up, but you must remember that Gears of War prevents us from looking at Minimum framerate performance data, which is likely what AMD is referencing. 

The biggest improvements in the game are in the minimum framerates, with game having much fewer large FPS dips, making the game feel and play much smoother. 

To conclude the past week has been very good for Gear of War: Ultimate Edition’s performance on AMD hardware, with our R9 380 and R9 Fury X GPUs performing much better in the game almost regardless of what settings or resolutions we use. The AMD performance in this game is still very disappointing when compared to Nvidia, but at least AMD hardware is usable now.

Hopefully The Coalition will continue to work on Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on order to further improve AMD’s GPU performance, but at least right now the game has became playable at lower resolutions. 

 

You can join the discussion on Gears of War: Ultimate Edition’s performance on AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3 driver on the OC3D Forums.