Gears of War 4 Review And Benchmark Performance Quick Take
Gears of War 4 Graphics & Benchmarks
GPU-giant NVIDIA was also heavily involved in the development of Gears 4. Over the course of five weeks the company spent time onsite with Gears of War 4 developer The Coalition, helping their team to understand the complexities of DirectX 12, tweaking PhysX to better handle the game’s weather conditions and more. In fairness, the game doesn’t seem to favor either GPU camp over the other and averages just above 60FPS on our lowest tier AMD 390X card at the ubiquitous 1080p display resolution.
What does matter most is available GPU VRAM especially when playing at a 4K resolution. To play on the game's highest presets, a relatively powerful graphics card is required. As you'll see in our testing in just a bit, cards like the GeForce GTX 970 and Radeon R9 390X manage to break the 60 FPS mark at 1080p, but we'd recommend more powerful graphics cards with at least 4GB of memory for resolutions above 1080p.
Gears of War 4 features support for 21:9 UltraWide aspect ratios and has over 30 in-game graphic settings to tweak. Some of these include tweakable Ambient Occlusion, Temporal AA, Capsule Shadow Quality, Screen Space Shadow Quality, various lighting tweaks, texture filtering, foliage draw distance and many more. The game also tells you the impact each setting has on your GPU, CPU and VRAM (Minor, Moderate, Major).
Gears 4 features its own in-game benchmark tool, which we used to test performance across a variety of GPUs. All testing was done with our Intel Core i7 6700K overclocked to 4.6GHz and using the game's Ultra graphics setting preset with no other tweaks. We did, however, set Async Compute to On.
What does matter most is available GPU VRAM especially when playing at a 4K resolution. To play on the game's highest presets, a relatively powerful graphics card is required. As you'll see in our testing in just a bit, cards like the GeForce GTX 970 and Radeon R9 390X manage to break the 60 FPS mark at 1080p, but we'd recommend more powerful graphics cards with at least 4GB of memory for resolutions above 1080p.
Gears of War 4 features support for 21:9 UltraWide aspect ratios and has over 30 in-game graphic settings to tweak. Some of these include tweakable Ambient Occlusion, Temporal AA, Capsule Shadow Quality, Screen Space Shadow Quality, various lighting tweaks, texture filtering, foliage draw distance and many more. The game also tells you the impact each setting has on your GPU, CPU and VRAM (Minor, Moderate, Major).
Gears 4 features its own in-game benchmark tool, which we used to test performance across a variety of GPUs. All testing was done with our Intel Core i7 6700K overclocked to 4.6GHz and using the game's Ultra graphics setting preset with no other tweaks. We did, however, set Async Compute to On.
Gears of War 4 performs well across our fleet of test cards. While, the GeForce GTX 1080 makes the best case for 4K Gears 4 gaming, with some time spent tweaking those 30 different in-game settings or a mix of lower presets and custom settings, players can achieve better 4K performance. That said, maintaining 60 FPS smoothness at 4K is beyond the capabilities of any single card, at least on the Ultra preset.
