Gears of... Unreal?

The game's most obvious change are its improved visuals. With Unreal Engine 3 (first showcased in Gears of War) handling the rendering duties, excellent graphics (Next Gen!) are to be expected. Even with beta code and scaled-down art assets (to keep the size of the demo in check), graphics are significantly better than any similar title on the market. Though the demo doesn't offer many graphics customization options, the most significant are the world detail and post-processing settings.

Hey, this blood looks very familiar...

Trying to get off one more shot before the inevitable

With Post Processing set to Intense, textures are bland and a bit washed out; at the Vivid setting, the world comes to life, particularly if the World Detail setting is cranked to its highest. Weapon effects aren't the best, though this will likely improve in the final release, and the same blood splattering in Gears of War is used here.

The bloom lighting is a bit overdone for my tastes, and it casts an ethereal glow over the levels, but the motion blur is just right (thought the hardcore set will likely disagree with any motion blur). Shangri La is the best example of a cohesive and balanced environment; both Heat Ray and Suspense are less than compelling and seem hurried in terms of design and polish. In short, the demo showcases an excellent base for a possibly stunning visual presentation, but the details, such as the ability to fine-tune individual graphics settings and final textures, are missing.

Post Processing set to Muted, one of four available settings

The Default setting, a bit more subtle

Vivid is a happy medium between Default and Intense

Things are a bit washed out with Post Processing set to Intense

Old Hardware Need Not Apply

Unsurprisingly, the level of hardware required to push pixels at an acceptable frame rate with medium-to-high visual settings is quite steep. Again, this is beta code, and Epic are certainly taking performance feedback from the demo into consideration when optimizing and tuning the final build. It took an Get it! Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU with 2GB RAM and an Get it! NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX to obtain a steady 50+ FPS at a resolution of 1920x1200 at the highest visual settings. I had to back down 1600x1200 to lock the frame rate at my display's 60Hz refresh rate, though with two cores disabled (leaving the system with two active cores, similar to an Intel Core 2 Dueo E6600 CPU), the frame rate didn't budge from 60 fps territory. On a less-powerful system - one that's slightly higher than the minimum system requirements (an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with 1GB of RAM and a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS video card) - performance was abysmal.

Graphics settings had to be cranked down below the visual point of no return, where textures are a blurry mess and jaggies threaten to poke your eyes out. This, at a resolution of 1280x1024. Needless to say, the best experience, in terms of both visuals and gameplay, will be had on moderately recent systems. According to Epic, this means a minimum of a 2.4GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and either an NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX or ATI Radeon X1300 GPU. Oh, and bring at least 512MB of video memory to the party - anything less, and texture detail and performance will suffer.