Gears of War Max Setings Benchmarked andReview on the 8600m gt DDR3!!

Gears of War Benchmarking and Review

Gears of War is one of the quintessential shooters available on the xbox 360. Critics have raved it as truly a next gen shooter, and this title will have both casual and hardcore gamers drooling over its intense game play, awesome immersion, and graphics and sound that will blow your senses out of the water.

We all know that gears of war ran well on the xbox360, how well will it perform on a pc.

Most people will ask: ' well I don't have a top of the line PC, will i still be able to enjoy its awesome bountifulness!'

Well I took the time to test this game, having just received it through ups today. My platform is fairly mid ranged by today's standards and so its performance should reflect how well most people will be able to play this game on their laptops. Here's a closer look at my setup;

Vista 32bit Running in 1280x800
2.2 ghz dual core t7500 SantaRosa
8600m gt ddr3 Overclocked to 665/850 core/memory respectively
3gb of ddr2 667mhz ram
200gb 7200rpm HDD

Notice that my graphics card is overclocked, this can be achieve fairly easily using rivatuner and following overclocking guides and testing procedures.

Now lets dive into in game settings for Gears of War

Resolution: 1280x800
Postprocess Display settings: Intense
Postprocess Quality: High
Texture Quality: Highest
Character Detail: High
Visual Effects: High
Decal Quality: Dynamic
Shadow Quality: High
V-sync: off
AS and DX10: off

- All settings are turned to maximum levels.

Here are in game screenshots using Frapps, take into consideration that frapps also eat up frames per second. Actual in game performance should be at least 2 frames above those shown.



FPS are very consistent during battle, ranging from mid 30s to high 40s.
The only slowdown that seems to happen is when the game is loading graphical resources. These occur every time you start on the next sub chapter and lasts for about 2 -3 seconds.

Major annoyance occur where you dont normally expect it. Loading screens gets very slow from time to time. Overall, it takes about half a minute to load, its not too bad, but the lag gets pretty noticeable. Heres an example:

Performance on Lower Cards:

This game should be very very enjoyable to most people. If you have at least a 8600m gt ddr3 and overclock it, you'll be able to play Gears of War on Max settings.

If you have a lower performing card such as 8600m gt ddr2, 8600m gs, 8400m gt, 9500m gs, etc, etc. You will need to turn down settings a bit. Here is an image comparison between Highest settings and Medium Settings in DX9 mode. Top image is in highest settings, bottom image in in medium settings.

Comparatively, You will most like see roughly 10 frames down the drain during normal play and 15+ fps lose during firefights when choosing to play on Highest.

Image quality wise, you'll notice blurring for objects further away in medium, there is increased utilization of shadows for close objects, which blurs image detail as well. Post process effects such as motion blur, depth of field, screen splash decrease in intensity. Overall, the game still looks gorgeous in Medium settings.

Closing Comments
Gears of war offers great visuals, and does it well on a medium range platform. You will experience very smooth game play where action is concerned, the only let down is major lags during loading. But you can overlook those since they don't occur during crucial moments. If you were deciding on this game, you should rest well knowing that it should run well on your rig.

 

excellent review
i could get that fps with my 8600m gs ddr2 overclock

 

wow that's pretty impressive. I guess it shows just how well gears run once again.

 

wow looks great.. i could prob get half the framerate u got

 

this is very remarkable. but still the Problem is with the Spikes.. Specially when playing online, you'll just get a headshot -.-

 

I think you'll be able to play this game well on your asus using max settings. You pretty much have the same specs as me. Im wondering how you're getting lower 3dmark06 scores though.

 

how much worse can it get? single player gets stable 30+ even with a full screen of enemies, no spikes at all.

I guess I will be testing and posting up results once im done.

 

Good job. I get similarly close with my 8600m GT DDRII

 

Yeah I can run gears on high settings with my 9500Gs on stock drivers the game looks and runs great on my laptop.

 

I think brainer means the occasional stuttering i.e loading textures that occurs when you enter a new area. Though there is tweaks for this.

 

Nice, The 8600M GT is much stronger than I thought.

 

Yer i can get very close to these with my 8600m gs 256 meg ddr3 card in my vaio fz31s @ 680/880, max temp 74 degrees! The UT3 engine is stellar! Although i only get just under 4000 3dmarks. Im still using the 169.04s as these are the only ones you can overclcok the 8600m gs with which is a biatch!

 

Yeh it does great in games that can optimize it. Thanks to the developers for that though. Im thinking about making a thread that list all the recent games that the 8600m gt ddr3 can run in MAX.

So far I have:

Mass Effect
Assassin's Creed
Gears of War

I cant run Oblivion on max for some reason. Draw distance isnt set to max. And its a older game. Wierd heh.

 

It's gddr3, no one uses ddr3 for graphics memory.

 

For some reason I can't run Gears of War and I know it's not the video card after I start it, it only shows the dude(I think it's Marcus Phoenix) in the cell and then I get a Windows stopped working alert and shuts down the program.I just bought the game.
One thing I noticed after installing it and uninstalling it then re-installing it, I never got a register this game or get prompted to type in the product key for the game, is this the problem?
Any ideas guys?Any help would be much aprreciated.Thanks!

 

IKAS: Yeh man, im suspecting that it might be your sli configuration thats messing up. I dont remember an option in gears of war that offers sli support, and like many games that runs sli horribly, it could be that gears of war just dont know how to render graphics at all when sli is enabled.

Go back into your Nvidia control panel and disable sli. Then run the game with a single 9800m gt which will be most than enough to run the game on max settings with anti aliasing enabled!

 

Im thinking that as long as xbox 360 is around and developers are making games on that console, we'll be able to run those games very very well. So for the next three years at least, we'll see and play plenty of next gen titles!

 

Yup, I can confirm Gears running very well on my 2.2 T7500 Macbook Pro (2 Gb RAM, 8600G with 128Mb). I have the game installed on an external WD disk (5400 rpm and connected with USB 2.0); load times go up but it doesn't affect playability too much.
Using Win XP Sp 3 and Apple's provided drivers here.

 

I want to buy this game but how does it play with keyboard and mouse? I hear it's better to play it with xbox controller. And as far as sli support I have a Toshiba x205 sli1 and on the wrist rest pad is a sticker of Gears of War. So I'm assuming the Toshiba x205sli1 when it came out was meant to showcase Gears of War running full steam on Sli but now I'm confused. Does Gears of War support SLI or not?

 

Gears of War doesn't offer sli support. You might want to try it out with sli first. And then disable it later if there are problems.

Playing with the game pad is way fun. Its hard to aim, but the rumble more than makes up for it in fun factor. Its still preference though, since i'll playing with mouse and key board in multiplayer mode, i thought i'll stick with them during single player campaign as well.

 

I only install games that can be used with the wireless 360 pad now, its so much better imo, the only game that i play with kb and mouse is ut99 and the obvious point and click games

 

Well it´s easy to run with SLI in Gears of War. First off for SLI users I always recommend Nhancer. Download Nhancer which has SLI profiles for lots of games.

With SLI enabled I run Gear of War though on my XPS M1730 at 62 fps all maxed out constantly even in firefights at 1920x1200 This with SLI enabled and running in Win XP Pro.

SLI takes time to get used. Usually you have to tweak to get the settings and make the game run right.

 

I googled sli supported games and linked to nividia and in the list of certified enhanced games Gears of War was listed. So just to clear things up is it better to play it with a controller or keyboard n mouse is it even playable with keyboard n mouse?

 

lol its a computer game, its definately playable with the keyboard and mouse. You actually have more control with the keyboard and mouse. Aiming is more precise and the key layouts feel pretty natural.

 

Or how the 8600mGT series performs. I always here people bash this level of GPUs, yet with the right drivers and settings they can do quite well.

One question is that 1280x800 the res of your xps?

 

keyboard and mouse is the way to go.. i have the 360 controller as well.. but aiming was a pain!!!

 

yeh its a big hassle to find well performing drivers, I had stock drivers which worked fine, and as soon as I overclocked i had to find new ones, and every single time i decided to take my overclockinh higher, i had to search around once again! Alll in all i had to spend like a month benchmark every driver b4 finding the right one. Thats just my story, im sure there are worse ones out there. The real problem is how sensitive the 8600m gt is to temperature and so finding a driver that finely balances temps and performance is way hard.

and yeh 1280x800 is native on my xps.

 

A native 1280x800 is nice especially if you play games. They look sharp and your 8600m GT will last for quite a while. Smart choice Wiley

 

Yeah I have tried many Dell drivers all with poor syntheic and real world results. I went back to laptopvideo2go.com and using 177.89 Its not only stable but woke the card up ALOT. As for sensitivity, it must be the ddr3 8600mGT because Ive OC'd mine and run max res on all my games and I never have an issue.

As for the res, 1280x800 works perfect for my HP, and worked well on my old 15.4in. But I find anything less then 1920x1200 a pin on my 17in vostro.

 

can Gears of War be play on the sager 5793 or is it to much for the system??

 

You can play it maxed out on DX10.

 

so on a laptop is ok????

 

yeah definitely ok. The game is great on the PC and looks better and runs much smoother 60fps. Though I must say Gears of War 2 is plain awesome on the 360, just finished it today. I really hope it gets on the PC so I can play it at 1920x1200 60 fps. The game had some issues with the framerate when lots were happening on screen at once or the brumak shows up.

Overall the game looks awesome. The whole Gears of War series is probably the best out there. I really like the tactical aspect of it.

 

Yeah
I've played on and finished it on PC
I don't think 2 is coming on PC anytime soon, if CliffyB is to be believed

He said it was due to piracy on PC, funny beacuse the 360 version was leaked online a month before it's release

Also, has any fix been released for the error/DRM that stops the game from working after 28 Jan
I feel like playing through it again but I don't want keep changing the date

 

Yes a patch has been released to fix that DRM error. Well he said Gears of War 1 also wouldn´t appear on the PC but it did. When sales are declining on the 360 of Gears 2 a PC version is released to accomodate for that.

This piracy bull is getting old, the consoles is being pirated more and more.

 

*still waiting for GoW2 PC*

 

Thanks, I'll check it out

Yep, sure it
I have 3 friends with 360s who haven't bought a single title and have like 50.
Me and my friends with pcs buy most of our games esp. ones with great multiplayer

Of course, this doesn't mean all 360 owners are pirates and pc gamers are saints
I am just making a point (don't flame me )

Yep me too

 

cool, i will give it a try tonite

 

Gears of War is awesome but I like it better on the console, its a pretty good review nice work

 

Yes but it looks far more better on the PC graphically, sharper textures, double framerate 62 fps constant compared to 30 fps on the console that dips down to 20 fps when lots are happening on the screen.

Also I have tweaked Gears of War even more to get it to look even better on my PC. This game is plain awesome on the PC and I hope Gears 2 gets released too so I can enjoy higher quality graphics and framerate compared to my xbox counterpart.

 

What did you do to tweak it

I'd be interested in tweaking it for my second play-through

Any tips

 

Yes sure, backup your WarEngineUserSettings.ini in your My Games\Gears of War For Windows\Wargame\Config.

Download my ini file attached here and overwrite the one you have, though first make the backup of course. Keep my ini file write protected so Gears of War does not overwrite any settings. Let me know what you think about it.

Let me know if it stutters for you, then I can tweak some of the LOD lines. I made this for my desktop 8800GTX. But try it anyway and hope it runs great for you.

 

Awesome

Does this improve the graphics?????
I'm not too sure

I'll try it our and get back to you, once I re-install the game

 

Yes it improves it slightly.