Microsoft’s attempt to bring their Xbox One games to PC hasn’t entirely worked out as well as they thought it would. While they generally look better than their console counterpart, optimization has been a huge issue. Fortunately, Gears of War 4 breaks the trend as it not only looks visually impressive on the platform, but runs surprisingly well maxed out. There is some stuttering during cutscenes in which will make the audio go out of sync, but other than that, Gears of War 4 holds up surprisingly well on PC. First off, there’s a ton of graphical options to go through, so many we’d rather take multiple photos than actually list them all:

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Running on an Intel i5-6600k CPU and Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU, we were able to max everything out on PC and maintain between 60 and 120fps, depending on the section. More open, chaotic locations generally fall in the former, whereas enclosed structures and corridors are the latter. Bumping it up to 1440p, we stayed between 40 and 80fps, and finally, 4K had us between 20 and 30fps. Not bad for a Microsoft published PC game.

From Xbox One to maxed out on PC, the changes in Gears of War 4 aren’t colossal, but there are some noticeable differences. For starters, the temporal AA does add a bit more blur to the geometry at a distance and is recognizable on Xbox One, but the PC version has a sharpening tool, bringing out more in the world. The general texture quality is better, as seen in the fourth comparison shot by looking at the giant gear to the right, and there’s more foliage in the environment. If you look at the first screenshot comparison, you can see the added grass and even flowers around the yard. There’s also higher resolution reflections in water, higher ambient occlusion, a greater level-of-detail, better lighting, and even added debris on the ground. There also seems to be a more measured motion blur at "Ultra" compared to Xbox One, which doesn't seem to be present in the third comparison shot seen on Marcus and Kait's feet. Now granted, this isn't a huge leap in comparison to Xbox One, but it should have PC users happy.

On the left is Xbox One, and on the right is the PC version:

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