Introduction

Gears 5 is the sixth installment in the Gears of War franchise from Microsoft Xbox Game Studios. Originally, the series was an Xbox-exclusive, but with Microsoft's push for interoperability between its Xbox and Windows PC platforms, and the introduction of Xbox Game Pass for PC, the company reconsidered. The PC release is not only available on Microsoft Store (which a lot of gamers hate), but also on Steam, which will definitely help reach a wider audience. Both platforms feature an optional high-resolution texture pack that makes the game come alive at higher resolutions, such as 4K.



A third-person shooter with certain FPS elements, Gears 5 follows the events of Gears of War 4 with Kait Diaz taking the lead as the protagonist Gears soldier. This mysterious outsider is connected to the Locust and must uncover dark secrets about the faction and her own origins. The main Gears characters JD, Walker, and Marcus, make a return as playable characters or NPCs in parts of the campaign that are cooperative.

Besides the main campaign, Gears 5 introduces the "Escape" gameplay mode in which three cooperative characters, dubbed Hivebusters, are dropped into a Locust hive to destroy all Locust presence in the location and then EXFIL. The "Horde" and "Versus" modes also make a return.

Based on the cross-platform Unreal Engine 4, Gears 5 takes advantage of DirectX 12 and rewards fast PC hardware with plenty of eye candy in vast post-apocalyptic landscapes. The game also runs on Windows 7 thanks to a DirectX-12-translation layer. Game developers "The Coalition" have made excellent use of the Unreal Engine feature-set. Gears 5 uses Asynchronous Compute, multi-threaded Command Buffers, and will be updated with support for AMD FidelityFX in the near future. The game is included in Microsoft's Game Pass Bundle, which means AMD gamers who get a free three-month game pass coupon can play it now.

In this review, we put Gears 5 through our selection of 23 graphics cards across the 1080p, 1440p, and 4K Ultra HD resolutions to show you what it takes to pull the most out of Xbox Studios' crown jewel.

Screenshots

Graphics Settings

All settings are displayed in one, long, list we broke apart into sections to make it easier to get an overview.

• "General Settings" deals with the usual monitor-configuration options.
• There's four predefined presets "low", "medium", "high", and "ultra". On top of that you get "recommended", which picks settings that are optimized for your CPU and GPU capabilities. Another option, "custom", lets you pick all settings on your own.
• A "borderless" mode is not available; only "fullscreen" and "windowed" are included.
• You may adjust the game's internal resolution scale between 50% and 200%.
• V-Sync can be disabled, and you can also remove all FPS caps, even for the real-time rendered cutscenes—very nice.
• Field of view can be adjusted between 60° and 100°—sufficient for everyone, I'd say.
• "Show Stats" lets you enable an FPS counter or a more detailed view that breaks up the statistics into FPS, time spent on the CPU, GPU and various other game code sections.
• "Brightness" and "HUD safe zone" calibration seem to be remnants from the console version. I've never had any reason to use these options in previous games.

• There's a plethora of "Texture Settings", which lets you adjust the details to your liking.
• Please note that the "Ultra Textures" high-resolution texture pack is an optional 10 GB download (DLC on Steam, separate package on MS Store).

• "Details Settings" lets you adjust the polygon count of the character models, and set the complexity of the game world.
• Foliage level of detail can be set separately, so you can have a richly detailed world, but still gain FPS by reducing the quality of the plants.
• "Animation quality" defaults to "Auto"; we picked "Best" to ensure a level playing field for all graphics cards. The red indicator in front of the option is dynamically added to any setting option if it might overload your hardware.

• "Shadow Settings" not only lets you adjust shadows (easy FPS gains), but also includes the controls for Ambient Occlusion.
• I've never seen a slider for Ambient Occlusion intensity control; probably not essential, it never hurts to have more dials. It has no performance effect.
• "Capsule Shadows" refers to the soft shadows produced by characters in indirectly lit areas.

• Map tessellation can be adjusted in "Environment Settings".
• Gears 5 uses quite a lot of fog for storytelling, so it won't hurt to have this option dialed up.
• I haven't seen a lot of reflections in the game, so you can definitely reduce "Screen Space Reflections" to gain some extra FPS.

• While the game makes heavy use of post-processing effects, they can all be adjusted or disabled here.
• This is especially important for "Motion Blur", which tends to cause nauseation.

• The "GPU" option lets you target a specific GPU in a multi-GPU system for the game's rendering.
• "Tiled Resources" is a method to more efficiently move data from the disk into VRAM—it's supported by all modern graphics cards.
• "Diagnostic Mode" enables a log file that might help you track down issues with rendering in the game.