Gears 5 Alpha Test Performance Review

Conclusion

When Gears (of War) 5 released this September, we plan to give the game a full performance analysis, but for now, we are pleased with how the game is shaping up on PC. 

For starters, we know that Gears 5 is coming to Steam, which is a first for the franchise, and beyond that, we know that the game will be available cheaply with Xbox Game Pass for PC. With Game Pass PC gamers can subscribe for one month, Blitz the game’s campaign and then move on. No need to pay any more unless you take a liking to the game’s multiplayer modes or wish to replay the campaign. Gears 5 will be incredibly accessible on PC.   

Based on the game’s Alpha test, we know that Gears 5 will be a lot more demanding than Gears of War 4’s PC incarnation, which should be expected given the leaps in power that gaming PCs have seen since then. For prime day AMD’s RX 580 was available for purchase for £116.99, showcasing how cheap capable gaming GPUs have become. If you search the used market even better deals are available. 

While 60 FPS framerates are not possible on the likes of Nvidia’s GTX 1060 Strix and RX 580 Strix at Ultra, they arrive close enough to that number to make 60FPS a distinct possibility at lower settings. Beyond that, the game was also able to run at 60 FPS framerates with fairly mediocre CPU specifications, as a quad-core 4GHz Broadwell processor is pretty meh by today’s standard. You can get a lot of CPU power for under £200 these days. 

VRAM-wise, Gears 5’s Alpha didn’t use more than 4GB of VRAM at 1080P Ultra settings and used less than 5GB at 1440p and less than 6GB at 4K, which is good news for users of modern graphics hardware. That said, it is possible that the final release of Gears 5 could use higher resolution textures, even so, users of 4GB graphics cards should have no reason to worry. 

While Gears 5 was able to place even our RTX 2080 Ti under 60FPS at 4K, the game offers more than enough graphical options to claw this performance back, and on top of that, there is still more than a month for both The Coalition to optimise their game and for Nvidia to optimise their GPU drivers. 

So far, Gears (of War) 5 is shaping up to be a scalable title that will run well on a variety of PC hardware configurations. Expect a more in-depth performance analysis from us when the game released in September. 

Gears 5 will release on September 9th on Steam and the Microsoft Store and on September 5th on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. 

You can join the discussion on Gears 5’s PC performance on the OC3D Forums.