The newest entry in the Gears franchise is available for those that bought the expensive version. While looking up people's impressions I came across a massive blog post from The Coalition in which they benchmarked the game on an insane range of GPUs (and otherwise modest hardware).

Definitely worth checking out for yourself, but tl;dr - it runs like a dream, seemingly.

Part of me wonders if they put in the work for this post this given all the issues Forza Horizon 3 has on PC. Assuming their benchmarks pan out for players, I think it proves that FH3 is just a crappy PC port.

i played a bit this morning. Running mostly solid at 60fps at 4k with ultra preset.

now to find someone i know to play co-op with...

@mike you getting this?!

Different developers just same publisher i dont think a game as recent as forza could affect this game so quickly. They just put in the effort and time like they all should.

@zurv: I just finished downloading the Ultimate Edition

@oursin_360: I was referring to them putting in the work to benchmark a bunch of cards and making a big blog post about PC performance. The game was done long before Horizon was even out.

Yeah, early reports suggest this thing runs like a dream. I guess that's the difference between a custom Forza engine and the scalability of Unreal. I can confirm the Xbox version runs beautifully as well.

I played a bit a yesterday. it was running well. Though I was trying to run the game on ultra and some of the textures didn't seem to load in.

Oh what kind of hardware?

@mike: im using a gtx 960( low end I know) but I kinda wanted to see what I can away with on ultra . Even on medium some textures didn't seem to load.

Ah, yeah that's definitely what happened lol. I wish i was still into gears I might have actually tried this.

Sounds like a throwback to unreal 3, but might have to do with how much vram you have? Or could just be some left over unreal texture streaming stuff.

My two notes from this:

They ran benchmarks with v-sync off. Gross.

FOV slider! That's an unexpected surprise.

Overall I'm really glad the reports on this are good after I got scared away from Horizon 3. I'll probably pick this up eventually (quantum break went to steam after a few weeks. A man can dream!)

here is how to looks on the PC.. i made a quick video.. it isn't 4k yet.. but youtube will take a day baking it.

yes, i'm pretty bad :) hahaha

With V-Sync on then the benchmark says less (because it can only render X frames a second on the scan-out cadence and multiples of it - that's assuming the game uses what nVidia call "Fast V-Sync" where it renders even when the queue is full, so can render multiple complete frames per scan-out to reduce latency*) so it's generally advisable to benchmark without it. That way you can see if the game it only just hitting 60fps or actually is at more like 80fps constant at that point (which would not be enough extra perf to make a difference when only scanning out the buffer at 60Hz).

Really glad they didn't skip on the FoV slider as it's an accessibility option and we should expect more from developers who don't want to eventually find themselves in court because they're selling something which makes people sick. Hopefully one day that will stop being a surprise for ports (especially as the technical issues with implementing it are basically trivial if you start a project assuming the FoV is not fixed - something you should do because 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 screens are all popular enough, not to mention 21:9).

This benchmarking stuff looks really good. Was glad (and somewhat surprised) to see the GTA V port also got a lot of effort put into making a settings area that empowers users to make choices (like the VRAM bar showing expected max VRAM load as settings were modified) and splitting out the CPU and GPU load (with processing times) like this will also let users understand what the code they're running is expecting from their system and so how to tweak it (and even what to upgrade if the system is getting old) to get a balanced performance.

* eg you've got a 60 Hz screen and the game is capable of rendering at 120+ fps with current settings. Each scan-out the game can render the next frame, then render a complete extra one which takes into account the input since the last frame and updated state of the world before the scan-out happens. So it's a marginal latency reduction compared to rendering the next frame then waiting for the scan out before starting again (ok, the reality is slightly more complex due to buffers but that's close enough to true to make an explanation).

@par1val: Hey not sure if this applies to your GPU but I noticed this in the known issues thread over on the official Gears 4 forum:

Minimum Spec – Textures do not appear to stream properly

When running the game on a minimum spec 2GB VRAM video card for the first time, textures may not appear to stream properly.

Solution: Restart the game to resolve the issue.

I watched the early Digital Foundry videos where they found no issues in running the game on less than stellar hardware, but when you watch gameplay it's not like there's a ton of physics and insanely technical level design going on, areas are the size of what they've always been in the franchise, there's never more than a handful of people on screen, textures, effects and lighting are greater obviously but if it did have problems running i'd be concerned. At the very least we now have a solid technical demonstration of what the Unreal Engine 4 can do, i'm glad they didn't screw it up, maybe Forza should be on Unreal :P.

@mike: Thanks. I found the same posting early today. Played the game again after work and it was fine. The game runs well and looks good.

I was hoping to see forza brake the mold in terms of xbox port performance on PC. Still, nice to see a major xbox franchise taking the time to make us pc snobs happy.

As boring as I think this game looks, major props to them for doing well by the PC userbase.

The difference is that Forza uses their own (until recently) non-PC engine, while Gears 4 uses Unreal Engine 4, so I'm not surprised that it runs well. Hopefully, the Forza games will improve in the future as Turn 10 and Playground get more experience with PC development.

My friend on a 1070 and 8 core AMD CPU is getting about 120fps on Ultra @ 1080.

I should be able to get 70ish fps at 1440p on my 1070. Glad it is well documented. Nvidia also have a really great settings breakdown.

Why would you run a benchmark with Vsync on? Literally all Vsync does is limit the framerate.