Gears of War: Tactics and 5 [XBSX 4K/60fps Gameplay]

[Shortbread]

4K/60fps

 

[Shortbread]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/xbox-series-x-unleashed-our-unrestricted-preview/

Like I said in my 2019 review, Gears 5 offers a smorgasbord of modes, and many of them max out at 60fps on Series X. But the versus matchmaking suite can go all the way to the system's 120fps maximum all while running at 4K resolution. I immediately booted my PC version of the game and created dummy lobbies in order to create like-for-like comparisons to show you how a $500 console's 120fps mode compares to the same thing on a $1,500+ PC:

If you're struggling to notice any differences, you're not alone. What's crazier is, these crisp, detailed images full of handsome touches are appearing in isolation, as opposed to the dazzlingly smooth flipbook effect of running, somersaulting, and shotgunning at 120fps. Yet Xbox Series X doesn't sweat in rendering these frames at a blistering 8.33 millisecond threshold with barely any noticeable lurches in my hours of testing (and, again, with zero noticeable noise spewing out of the console at peak load). There's no getting around it: Series X is a fundamental game-changer in terms of console power, and Gears 5's buttery smooth 120fps toggle has me instantly excited at the prospect of other console-game developers following suit.

Microsoft's dev team at the Coalition already showed off a Gears 5 Series X build in March of this year, though this revolved around content capped at 60fps. This showed the game's campaign mode nearly reaching parity with the PC version while offering updates to its global illumination model. In the months since, the PC version has apparently adopted some of those illumination tweaks, so like-for-like comparisons show the PC version narrowly beating that of Xbox Series X on a visual basis, primarily due to superior ambient occlusion on the PC version... but, again, that's a PC version jacked up to "ultra" and "maximum" settings while running on an i7-8700K and RTX 3080. For pretty much every other graphical element you can think of (draw distance, shadow resolution, geometric detail), Series X is neck-and-neck.

When it comes to load times, the Series X version of Gears 5 handily beat out even a high-end PC equipped with an NVMe 3.0 drive (which stored both the Windows OS and the game). After testing a variety of Gears 5 campaign save files, I found a 75 percent improvement for the console version; 53-second loads on my PC were as short as 12 seconds on my Xbox Series X for identical content.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

I really love this game. It's fantastic. Wasteland 3 has more depth, but this game is simplified in a good way and has cooler cinematics and story. I'm only about 3 hours into it, but it's really making me love my XSX.