One of the trends we’re seeing with this new generation of consoles is the arrival of visual updates for last generation games – basically, new features designed to take advantage of more powerful hardware. Gears 5 is one of the first titles revealed to be receiving this sort of update and along with upcoming story DLC, it feels almost like a soft relaunch. In the process, one of the best-looking games for Xbox One looks better than ever – it’s basically a graphics and performance upgrade with some cool new features added in.
To get the basics out of the way first, Gears 5 retains the use of dynamic resolution scaling, but based on pixel counting a selection of shots, it seems to average out at around 1728p during gameplay, with full 2160p manifesting in less busy situations. Interestingly, the lower bounds is still 1080p – just as it was on Xbox One X – but it’s extremely uncommon for resolution to hit this level. By comparison, Xbox One X could drop to near 1080p much more often.
The multiplayer mode is a little more aggressive with its dynamic resolution solution owing to its higher performance targets – yes, 120 frames per second is the target – but it still looks solid. Image quality was already good thanks to Unreal’s temporal anti-aliasing implementation and it’s improved here thanks to a higher average resolution. We don’t yet have a Series S console but we were told that Gears 5 maxes out at 1440p on the high-end suggesting an average resolution somewhere between Xbox One and Xbox One X while still hitting the same frame-rate targets as Series X.
In terms of detail levels, the PC version is used as a basis with settings bumped up to ultra across the board. This means higher quality volumetric lighting, improved shadows and more. There is an increase in detail in the new version too thanks to level of detail being pushed out – but the overall effect is relatively subtle but leads to a more stable, solid-looking game. Effects work is also increased. The Coalition bumps up the quality of screen-space reflections, increasing the quality and number of surfaces using the effect – many of these surfaces lacked SSR completely on Xbox One X and the effect is more broadly in line with the PC version.
Gears 5 takes just partial advantage of the Xbox Velocity Architecture – the NVME SSD. Hardware decompression, the new DirectStorage API layer and the Sampler Feedback Streaming are not in use with this game. The simple nature of being installed to an SSD has a huge impact on data transfer speeds, however. Loading times on One X could take more than 45 seconds in most scenarios. On Series X, however, this is reduced to a mere fraction of the time – often under ten seconds.