Gears of War 4 Performance Review - Forget about the Ultimate Edition

Okay, I go the business concern. After the multiple botched launches on the Windows Store regarding UWP titles, including the Gears of War Ultimate Edition, you lot have every reason to exist concerned about the launch of Gears of War 4. Thankfully, this time they pulled it off. Gears of War 4 is running in full DX12 celebrity, featuring implementations such as excellent multi threading, tiled resources, and even that magical Asynchronous Compute functionality! For those wanting to dig in an really see what all is going on with the settings the guys over at NVIDIA did a full breakdown of each setting and even the touch on of those settings when used with a GeForce graphics carte du jour.

Thankfully for our testing as well every bit yours at home, if you care to join in with your results in the comments, The Coalition has included an fantabulous built in benchmarking utility. Subsequently playing about 5-6 hours of the campaign with various cards I found the built in benchmarking utility to be very consistent with real world gaming scenarios within GoW4 so we felt confident in relying on the numbers it gave the states so that nosotros could deliver as many results and conduct as many tests as possible.

I have to applaud The Coalition for avoiding the 'accented minimum' FPS trap. The reason I say this is considering the accented minimum could be a wild outlying frame that you may not fifty-fifty detect. It's the corporeality of time that the FPS stays around those low that become important. In most of our testing we strive to show the 1% and .ane% lows, but The Coalition does a keen chore with at least providing the 5% lows which is adequately representative of what you'll run into when gaming.

Testing was all completed on the standard test organization that we used where we completed three runs with each graphics card and took the average of the Average frame rates every bit well every bit the 5% minimums. All of the tests were run at the standard 'Ultra' setting and making sure to disable the game'due south built in dynamic resolution scaling to ensure that the game was running at its true resolution. Another thing of interest is that if the menu supported it and the pick was present Async Compute was used for all of these tests. Unfortunately, this option was missing for all of our Maxwell cards, only did show and was functional with our GTX 1060. Settings that were used tin be found below.

X99 Examination System

CPU	Intel Core i7 6800k (iv.1GHz)
Retentivity	32GB CORSAIR Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666MHz
Motherboard	ASUS X99A-Two
Storage	Crucial MX100 512GB SSD Seagate 2TB SSHD
PSU	Corsair AX860i

Drivers used

Radeon cards used Crimson 16.9.2

GeForce cards used Geforce 373.02

Getting To The Results with 1080p

Starting things off with 1080p testing, nosotros felt it relevant to show how this game tin run on entry level hardware. This is a section that we promise to go along going forward in testing and can maybe give a little tease of our upcoming Sapphire RX 460 Nitro Review. For the entry level testing, we kept a divide nautical chart where these cards were tested at a modest 'medium' preset to simulate what people would most likely use for these cards.

Just kicking things into loftier gear for the total suite of graphics cards at 1080p Ultra resulted in surprisingly good performance beyond the board with pretty much every mid range cards not falling under 60fps for the 5% minimum. Something to keep in mind is that, even at 1080p, Gears of War iv loves VRAM. Easily chewing up 4.6GB when using the GTX 980ti, but managing to hand the 4GB limit of other cards by keeping that limit in cheque with the R9 Fury X but consuming 3.62GB of VRAM.

Turning Things Up To 1440p

Stepping up your game to the quickly becoming standard 1440p and it starts to become pretty rough out there. We get-go to run into things become a fair bit more difficult to push resulting in a pretty big hit with but our GTX 980ti able to maintain that greater than 60FPS 5% minimums. Interestingly enough the VRAM usage didn't become upwardly by as much every bit expected with the GTX 980ti only up 300MB to 4.97GB of usage while the R9 Fury X remained at the three.62GB wall.

At present We're Just Being Silly at 4k

Okay, 4k on the graphics cards we have with this game set to Ultra is a fleck out of accomplish, simply it's always fun to come across just where they would all land. If yous're okay with staying close to 30FPS then either the GTX 980ti or the R9 Fury X are gonna be the bare minimum to pull that off, otherwise stay at a lower resolution or accept advantage of that negative resolution scaling selection to help eternalize a few more frames out of the game. VRAM is in high need here with the GTX 980ti beingness able to swallow upward 5.25GB easily.

Asynchronous Compute?

Asynchronous Compute shows up once more. A great feature of DX12 that has been a indicate of contention amongst many people. Mostly because of the fashion information technology'south handled by the graphics menu manufacturers. I handles it primarily on the hardware side while the other handles it on the software side. We're not here today to argue who is good, bad, correct, or incorrect. We're here today to ask and answer: Does it work? The short answer is yes, it does piece of work. Just, information technology's not a game changer for Gears of War 4 in the same manner that it is in games like Ashes of the Singularity or DOOM. Digging a bit deeper we feel that tiles resources seem to exist more influential on this game's performance. After all, nether the setting for Async Compute the performance impact is rated as 'minor'.

What About CPU Cores?

Another aspect of DX12 that many were looking forrad to was the efficiency that the API would bring to multi cadre processors. More cores the better, right? Well, to notice this answer we took the i7 6800k that we use in our exam system and broke it down to a dual cadre and worked our style back up to see just how much of an affect cadre and thread count fabricated on this game. Pairing up the GTX 980ti to force equally much discrepancy every bit we could, we institute that even a quad core is going to be a bit of a hold for higher end GPUs. Seems like the argument for viii threads is becoming actually compelling. Interestingly enough the driblet in FPS we saw with full 12 threads enabled was consistent, that ane might need a trivial more digging, or perhaps an improvement beyond 8 threads could be patched in.

Final Thoughts

Gears of War 4 is a massive improvement over the initial Windows Store launch of GoW: UE. Coming hot on the heals of the excellently performing Forza Horizon iii the signals are articulate that someone is listening. A game as beautiful and detailed equally this i is able to run great on all mainstream graphics cards we tested at 1080p, even allowing for the entry level market to get a sense of taste of the action with lower detail settings. Supporting upwards to 4k and out the gate compatibility for 21:9 monitors, The Coalition conspicuously built this game for the PC and information technology's non a lazy port at all.

Unfortunately mGPU back up is absent-minded at launch, but we've been ensured that information technology'south coming 'soon'. One thing we left out of these tests were the "Insane" settings, mostly because these are exterior of the realm of the typical gamer and every bit stated past Mike Rayner they are forward-looking for hereafter hardware.

"Technical Director Mike Rayner describes these settings: "The game will calibration with new hardware that will come up out. You lot demand a really high spec to go in there. It looks crawly, but it's very GPU-hungry". "

TL:DR: Gears of War 4 performs keen on PC.