Gears of War 4 will soon be making its way to Xbox One and Windows 10 PC as part of Microsoft’s big Play Anywhere program.
As a result of this cross-pollination, the question on the lips of every PC gamer remains: are there any PC exclusive enhancements or options to look forward to?
Thankfully, the answer seems to be yes. Eurogamer sat down with Mike Rayner, technical director for Gears of War 4 developer The Coalition, and some PC exclusive treats were revealed.
Rayner said:
Our focus on PC is to deliver a highly optimised, customisable experience first and foremost. Support for v-sync tearing has recently come to UWP and we will be able to offer proper unlocked frame-rate support that gamers expect on day one. With Unreal Engine 4 and our own custom modifications, we can take much better advantage of multiple CPU cores, alleviating the game from being CPU-bound and allowing more room for the GPU to shine with enhanced visual quality or higher framerates. Single-player will not be locked to 30fps on PC.
Rayner also spoke of full keyboard and mouse input remapping, up to 4K resolution for certain texture groups, and dynamic resolution support.
There’ll be a crap load of extensive video settings for PC gamers to tweak as they see fit – Rayner said there are 28 different options at the moment, with more potentially to come.
He explained:
Along with more settings, we’re putting extra time into making it clear what impact a setting will have on GPU/CPU/VRAM so there is a clear correlation between a setting change and its performance impact.
The PC version will also support dynamic resolution scaling, designed to lock the game at 30fps in single player, and 60fps in multiplayer.
Rayner said:
You can super-sample, let’s say up to 4K, and then enable dynamic scaling and set the maximum amount of scaling you want to allow so you can maintain a very crisp image with scaling kicking in where needed and only to the amount you consider acceptable.
Honestly, you have to admire the amount of work PC gamers put into getting their gameplay experiences just right, tailoring the gameplay and visuals specifically to themselves and their machines.
Gears of War 4 launches for Xbox One and PC on October 11. Thanks to the Play Anywhere scheme, buying one copy will unlock the game across both platforms.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.