Gears of War 4 PC Performance Review

Introduction

When the last iteration of Gears of War was released on PC, gamers were not impressed, with the port suffering from huge technical issues and  lacking support for key features like FreeSync and G-Sync due to the game’s use of UWP program. 

Since then Microsoft has made several key improvements to UWP as well as announcing the Xbox Play Anywhere program, which allows owners of the Xbox version to access the PC version on the same Microsoft account. Alongside these changes, The Coalition, the developers of Gears of War, has learnt a lot from their mistakes when developing Gears of War Ultimate Edition on the PC and are looking to show off their new found PC development skills. 

The new PC version of Gears of War Ultimate Edition is an ambitious release on PC, looking to regain the support of PC users with 4K texture support, built-in benchmarking tools and one of the largest options menus that we have ever seen in a PC game. Will Gears of War 4 perform well on PC, or is this another shoddy Xbox One port? 

 

 

Drivers 

For this game, we will be using the newest drivers that were available when the game released, which is Nvidia’s Game Ready Geforce 373.06 driver and AMD’s 16.10.1 driver, both of which are the most recent GPU drivers for either company. 

 

Test Setup  

We will be testing this game on our dedicated GPU test rig using both high-end and mid-range GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. 

 

Game Test Rig
Intel i7 6850K
ASUS X99 Strix
G.Skill Ripjaws 4x4GB DDR4 3200MHz
Corsair HX1200i
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10 x64 

         

Nvidia GTX 980Ti (Left), AMD R9 Fury X (Middle) GTX 1070 Founders Edition (Right)

 

For the high-end, we will be testing AMD’s R9 Fury X, the GTX 980Ti and the GTX 1070.  Sadly we do not have a GTX 1080 to test at this time. 

For the Mid-range offerings, we will be testing the new RX 480 and GTX 1060, both of which will be the ASUS Strix Gaming models.

 

     

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix (Left), ASUS RX 480 Strix (Right)

 

To represent AMD and Nvidia’s lower-end GPU offerings we have decided to use the AMD R9 380 and the Nvidia GTX 960. Both of these GPUs will be the ASUS Strix models. 

Both of these GPUs offer very similar performance in most scenarios and come in at very similar price points, so it will be very interesting to see which GPU will come out on top. 

 

            

Nvidia GTX 960(Left), AMD R9 380(Right)