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Gears of War for Windows

Power To The People

In fact, Gears of War runs on an entirely different version of the Unreal Engine - code that is so different that moving the new PC content to the original Xbox 360 release just isn't technically feasible (cue the whining and conspiracy theories, Xbox 360 owners). The engine powering the PC version of Gears of War is closer to Unreal Tournament 3 than to the Xbox 360 version, and the work spent optimizing the Unreal Engine on the PC is evident. Most gaming PCs will have no problem running Gears of War at a moderate resolution with medium detail settings, though Microsoft's minimum specifications are too underpowered to drive the game at anything but the lowest visual settings.

While the game is playable with Microsoft's minimum requirements at 800x600 with Low settings, it's not pretty

With a system that meets the YouGamers' minimum requirements, Gears of War runs well at Medium settings

The game will run on a system with an  NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or  ATI Radeon X700 based card, but just barely, and only at a resolution of 1024 x 768 with blurry textures and no advanced lighting effects. For a more enjoyable experience, consider the YouGamers' minimum requirements, which will push the game at a respectable 1280 x 1024 at Medium detail settings (without antialiasing or anisotropic filtering). These requirements call for an  AMD Athlon 64 3400+ or  Intel Pentium 4 540, 1 GB of system memory and either an  ATI Radeon X1650 or  NVIDIA GeForce 7600. With 256MB of video memory, a system with these specs will get you through the game with decent visuals.

With a YouGamers' Recommended system, graphics options can be set to their highest at widescreen resolutions

... and with a powerful dual- or quad-core system and a sufficiently powerful video card, antialiasing can be enabled as well

A Relevant Aside, Then Back To Hardware

What follows is a bit of an aside, but stick with me here: in a video game, the quality of the visuals is inversely proportionate to the amount of imagination you, the gamer, have to use to the experience to life in your mind. Let's call this the "Imagination Factor". The higher the Imagination Factor, the more your brain has to compensate for the difference between the virtual world rendered on the screen and what you perceive as "real." As the Imagination Factor approaches one - the IF rating for the world in which we live - the less your noggin has to work to maintain the suspension of disbelief. Yes, I just now made up the term "Imagination Factor", and no, I have no idea how to actually calculate an IF rating (or if it's even useful to do such a thing). I do, however, have a point: the quality of the graphics in contemporary video games is advancing at a quick pace, which means that we're using less of our brains deciphering what game designers intended us to see; the vision is explicitly laid before our eyes. This isn't to say that the ideal game mimics our own reality with hyper-realism; the goal of a game is to express designers' visions on a PC monitor. Got that? OK, class dismissed (we'll save control schemes and input devices for another lesson).

DirectX10 rendering, with Antialiasing turned off. Looks great, but the jaggies and stair-step edges are clearly visible

The sole visual benefit provided by DirectX 10 rendering is Antialiasing, which looks great but is a framerate killer

We're not jumping into virtual reality worlds just yet, but Gears of War has one of the lowest IF ratings of any PC game. It doesn't match the stunning quality of Crytek's Crysis, but to its credit Gears of War runs acceptably at the highest of visual settings on hardware that you can buy in a store today. Take the YouGamers' recommended system: an  AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ or  Intel Core 2 Duo E6450, 2 GB of RAM and either an  ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro or  NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (each with 512MB of video memory). These video cards (couple with a fast dual-core processor) have the processing power and the memory to run the game at up to 1920 x 1200 without many dips below 50 FPS. If you can afford a 768MB  NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX video card and have a sufficiently fast CPU to avoid a bottleneck, then you can turn on antialiasing (under Vista with DirectX 10 only), though gameplay becomes choppy at times. With top-of-the-line hardware, the visuals exceed the quality of those on the Xbox 360 by a noticeable margin, due in large part to the higher native resolutions afforded on a PC.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Gameplay - Single-PlayerPage 3: Gameplay - MultiplayerPage 4: GraphicsPage 5: PerformancePage 6: Issues, Summary and Scores

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