Gears of War 4 released for PC on October 11 (October 7 for Ultimate Edition buyers). The abundance of graphical settings meets the expectations of any enthusiast, and thanks to cross-platform support, you can play in co-op and Horde mode with Xbox One owners, as well as in private multiplayer matches with friends.
You can learn more about the game in our review, which will appear later, and in this article we will analyze all the graphical options, provide comparative screenshots and highlight the impact on image quality and performance.
The variety of settings allows you to run the game on almost any DirectX 12-capable graphics card, including the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, which produces about 45 fps at 1920 × 1080 at medium-low settings. Of course, the game from The Coalition does not look the best at low settings, so in the official requirements Microsoft recommends GeForce GTX 1060 and Radeon RX480, and for maximum settings in 4K GeForce GTX 1080.
System requirements
Minimum
- OS: Windows 10
- DirectX: DX12
- Processor: i5 3470 @ 3 GHz
- Video card: GeForce GTX 750 Ti or Radeon R7 260X
- Video memory: 2 GB
- RAM: 8 GB
- Hard Drive: 80 GB
- Processor: i5 4690 @ 3.5 GHz
- Video card: GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon rx480
- Video memory: 4 GB
Ideal
- Processor: i7 4790 @ 4 GHz
- Video card: GeForce GTX 980 Ti or GeForce GTX 1080
- Video memory: 6 GB or more
- RAM: 16 GB
- Hard Drive: 80 GB SSD
Gears of War 4 graphics settings
Below is a detailed breakdown of each option, showing the difference in values in comparisons and evaluating the impact on performance. We conclude by testing the game on Ultra and Insane, determining the level of performance required to get the most out of Gears of War 4's graphical beauties.
Ambient Occlusion Quality
Ambient Occlusion (AO) adds contact shadows where two surfaces or objects meet and where one object is blocking the light from hitting the others. The AO technique used and the quality of its implementation affects the accuracy of rendering shadows and the placement of new shadows in places with low accumulation of shaded objects. Without Ambient Occlusion, the scene looks flat and implausible, and objects appear suspended in mid-air.
In Gears of War 4, this setting allows you to toggle between three quality options for the authoring SSAO, and the Ambient Occlusion Intensity slider controls the amount of visible contact shadows.
First, let's leave the slider in the default position and consider the quality options:
As expected, the AO effect is more accurate and noticeable at high values, and significantly affects the graphics in scenes with expansive views. By increasing the Ambient Occlusion Intensity, we increase the minimum visible shadows:
In other locations, +15 is already too much, so we recommend keeping the standard +7.
Performance: SSAO from The Coalition will cost 2 extra frames per second on Medium and High and 6 on Ultra, which may be a little too much for some systems.
Ambient Occlusion Intensity has no performance impact.
Anti-Aliasing Quality
In Gears of War 4, temporal anti-aliasing is constantly applied to reduce aliasing across the entire screen area and to counteract edge flickering during camera or scene movement. For example, without temporary anti-aliasing, aliasing on swaying foliage and grass in one of the first scenes would be immediately noticeable.
There are four quality levels available, but it is very difficult to tell the difference in screenshots; there is noticeably less blur and jitter in motion at high values (at 1920 × 1080).
Screenshots of the same scene with a scaled up to 200% resolution (3840x2160):
When upscaled to 2560x1440 and above on monitors with standard 1920x1080, Medium does a good job of normal and temporal aliasing without leaving much noticeable blur or jitter. Although, to completely eliminate negative effects, it is still better to set the setting to High.
As with any post-processing anti-aliasing, local anti-aliasing slightly blurs the image. You can combat this by resorting to downsampling or the Sharpening option. We will talk about it separately below.
To combat aliasing caused by Sharpening or simply low resolution, you can use the Temporal AA Sharpening option. It will enhance the effect of temporary anti-aliasing, but will increase the aliasing of fixed edges.
In the comparison below, you can compare the flag and window, which look respectively better and worse when Temporal AA Sharpening is increased.
Performance: Given the subtle impact of anti-aliasing (Low and Ultra share 0.3 fps), everyone should use Ultra, ideally paired with a scalable resolution that will increase clarity and sharpness without the need for the two options described above.
Temporal AA Sharpening does not affect performance.
Bloom quality
This effect increases the intensity and enhances the display of bright lights and their interaction with other visual effects. Plus, it allows you to use the Lens Flare Quality option.
There are three settings available, plus you can completely disable Bloom.
In other scenes, the effect is not so noticeable and is often reduced to the glow around the lamps and reflections on the armor. Interestingly, Medium looks nicer than High because of its less accurate, approximate action.
Performance: Bloom slows down by less than 1 fps, which jumps to 1.6 fps on Ultra.
Capsule Shadow Quality
Prior to Unreal Engine 4.11, in scenes with indirect lighting, characters appeared to be floating in the air due to a lack of shadows on the ground (diffuse shading helped, but did not completely solve the problem). The new Capsule Shadow Quality effect adds very soft shadows cast by the capsule representations of the characters to make them really stand on the ground like in the image below.
In Gears of War 4, due to the location of the camera and the dynamics of what is happening, this effect is not always noticeable, but when it is still noticeable, the difference is quite noticeable:
In Ultra tests, capsule shadows were added to all characters and NPCs in the scene, on High only to your squad and nearby enemies, and on Medium, their quality dropped sharply.
Performance: Subtracting 1.3 fps, capsule shadows provide an affordable way to enhance image believability in scenes with indirect lighting.
Character Level of Detail
The setting is responsible for the quality of the models of non-playable characters, including enemies.
- Ultra: Maximum quality for all characters at any distance.
- High: The maximum quality of all characters, however, the quality decreases as the distance to them increases.
- Medium: The two closest ones are displayed in maximum quality, the other two in close to maximum quality, the rest in low quality.
- Low: One closest to the maximum, the second close to the maximum, all the rest in the low. At a distance, quality drops faster.
In practice, the differences in values cannot be discerned, even in levels with many enemies. Zooming in Photoshop lets you see the difference at the pixel level, and the most keen-sighted of you will probably notice it in play, but most certainly won't.
Performance: The spread between the minimum and maximum values is only 0.8 fps, so you can set the option to Ultra.
Character Texture Detail
It may seem that the name of the setting speaks for itself, but in fact, texture resolution changes not only on characters, but also on weapons and vehicles.
In the comparison below - from the video rendered in real time - we can see the limited impact of the setting, it affects only a few textures.
During gameplay, the effect of the option affects the entire character model, and we also see a significant improvement in the texture of the weapon, comparing Ultra and High.
Performance: Like any setting related to textures, this can only be limited by the amount of video memory. Since 6GB is enough even for maximum 4K quality, most modern graphics cards can easily handle any texture setting of a game on Ultra at 1920 × 1080. However, we should note that the official requirements for Ultra are "6 GB or more" - keep this in mind when assessing the potential of your system.
Note: On configurations with mechanical drives and 4-core processors, unpacking and loading textures and corresponding mipmaps will take more time and processing cycles, taking processor time from other tasks. This could potentially lead to a lower frame rate, longer download times and temporarily limit the use of the video card to the maximum. This applies to all texture settings, especially when increasing the World Texture Detail due to the volume of textures for which it is responsible. For the best Gears of War 4 experience, play on a system with an SSD and a processor with six or more cores.
Depth of Field
This setting only adds out-of-focus blur to cutscenes rendered in real time (not pre-rendered video files). The Insane setting for the most powerful computers changes the effect to a Radial Depth of Field (Circle DoF), first shown in a mesmerizing demo. " A boy & his kite ».
Radial depth of field, as opposed to Gaussian depth working on Medium, High and Ultra, is more like focusing on newer cameras. However, its effect is difficult to notice due to the softness of the effect and the constant movement of the camera. An example can be seen below: Circle DoF smooths and blurs some details and counteracts jitter and aliasing around the holes through which the characters are visible.
In this scene, only the smallest differences are visible on the leaves and at the top of the screen:
And here the image is already much softer on Insane, the jitter around the enemies, on the splashes of blood and on the window at the top right has been eliminated:
Performance: Insane Depth of Field will cost you an extra 17.6 fps when switching from Ultra, so at 30 fps while playing in the splash screens you can see 12. At the same time, the almost identical Ultra value is 5.7 fps slower than Low. and a decent quality High is only 2 fps slower.
Most players should turn on High, as Medium only turns on the effect in select scenes. Ultra is not much better than High most of the time, and Insane simply doesn't pay off, unless you have a supercomputer from the future that can easily handle this value.
Dynamic resolution scaling
In recent years, console games have adopted dynamic downsampling techniques during intense action, maintaining the coveted 30 or 60 fps. Today we see this kind of technology on PC in Forza Motorsport 6: APEX, Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4. When used correctly, it helps to improve the picture as much as possible, keeping the gameplay smooth even in the most intense moments of the game.
In the screenshots above, we did the following:
- We installed a frame rate ceiling, opening access to the Dynamic Resolution Scaling setting.
- Set the scalable resolution to 33% (2560x1440) with the Scaled Resolution option.
- Enabled Dynamic Resolution Scaling in the advanced settings menu.
- They also set Dynamic Resolution Amount to 33%.
This combination of settings allows you to play on a Full HD monitor at 2560 × 1440 resolution. If the frame rate drops below 90 fps, the resolution will drop down to the original one until the load subsides, allowing you to enable downsampling again. Thus, the resolution can not be made lower than the screen resolution, avoiding upscaling and making the most of the available performance.
And of course, if you have serious performance issues, this way you can lower the rendering resolution without sacrificing the clarity of the menu and interface elements.
Effects Texture Detail
When thinking about visuals in a game, you usually imagine explosions, fire and smoke, which are often rendered using particles and other technologies. However, given the right conditions and the use of special technical tricks, it is possible to implement fire and other effects in the form of multilayered textures - as a rule, on the periphery or in the background, where the player will not be able to appreciate the graphics in detail.
However, in rare cases, you can get closer and see how the effect works:
In expansive views, the resolution of small flames is not so noticeable, and you can only notice the effect of the setting on large flames and smoke in Photoshop or in comparisons.
Performance: This is a texture setting, limited only by the amount of video memory.
Environment Reflections
When this option is enabled, objects and surfaces with reflective properties reflect the world around them, and in some cases this can significantly improve the overall picture. The main effect of the setting is noticeable on wet floors and characters' armor, which would otherwise remain incredibly bright and shiny in dark scenes.
Performance: Environment Reflections costs only 1.3 fps and should be enabled on most configurations.
Foliage Draw Distance
This setting is mostly responsible for drawing distance of grass and small flowers, but some bushes and large plants are also affected. As you can see below, Ultra shows the grass in the entire field of view, and also improves the quality of vegetation near the bridge, Medium cuts the grass at a distance, and Low removes almost everything - the rest can be adjusted with the World Level of Detail setting.
You may have noticed that Foliage Draw Distance also affects pebbles and boulders, with the exception of those controlled by the World Level of Detail. In some scenes, this changes the picture significantly:
Performance: Assuming there are rocks, grass and other elements in the scene that are affected by the setting, Foliage Draw Distance reduces the frame rate by 2.9 fps.
In our opinion, it is not worth dropping below High due to the decrease in vegetation density and the sudden appearance of objects on Medium.
Lens Flare Quality
Lens Flare is responsible for flare when aiming the camera at a bright light source. As you can see below, higher values increase the resolution of the effect, making the transitions between highlights more distinct:
In other scenes, additional highlights may appear at high values:
Performance: Occasionally, the observed effect will cost you 2.1 fps, however, to activate it, you need to enable Bloom, and their overall impact on performance will be slightly more significant.
If you're desperate for performance, you can turn off Lens Flare, which is far from the most important effect for overall image quality.
Light scattering quality
The setting is responsible for the rarely occurring volumetric lighting effect covered by moving objects, improving the quality of fusion with transparent surfaces and other game elements, as well as the quality of the shadows corresponding to the effect.
Performance: Medium slows down the game by 1.4 fps, which should be enough for most given the decent quality and the sparse appearance of the effect. For comparison, High lowers the frame rate by 2.3 and Ultra by 3.3 fps.
Light shaft quality
In Gears of War 4, you will often see light mines (aka "rays of god" or "twilight rays"), but only those generated by sunlight in some acts of the game are controlled by this setting.
As you must have noticed in the comparisons, high values increase the quantity, quality and fidelity of the rays and their effect on the attractiveness of the image.
Performance: Activating Light Shaft Quality will subtract 1.1 fps, and the maximum value is 2.5 fps.
Lighting Texture Detail
The setting is responsible for the quality of lightmaps and shadowmaps. Lightmaps in statically lit scenes allow you to preserve the brightness of surfaces and objects in the form of textures, which reduces the load on the computer. Shadow maps do the same for static shadows. However, at close range, more beautiful dynamic shadows may be included to increase realism.
As you would expect, the quality of these textures increases with the setting value, creating richer and more realistic scenes with beautiful highlights and shadows:
Performance: This is a texture setting that does not significantly affect performance.
Particle Spawn Rate
Killing enemies, hitting various surfaces and exploding grenades create particles, and this setting is responsible for the quality of the effects based on them. In practice, lowering the setting results in less smoke from the rifle, smoke and dust from shooting at targets, shrapnel from shooting at the ground, and blood from hitting enemies. Other smoke and dozens of other effects also depend on particles, so the influence of the Particle Spawn Rate on the image quality is quite noticeable.
As always, it is almost impossible to compare dynamic effects, but below we tried to show the difference between the maximum and minimum values, expressed in smoke density and the number of small fire sources:
Performance: Determining the maximum performance cost for this setting is difficult because we cannot evaluate every single application of particles in the game. According to the test results, the difference between the maximum and minimum values was 2.4 fps.
Post Process Quality
This setting allows you to enable eye adaptation and tone mapping, and also sets the quality of the translucency applied to special effects and transparent objects. Eye adaptation is similar to the HDR option in older games - it is the effect of the eye reaction to the transition from a dark area to a bright area and back again. Tone Mapping converts colors from a wide dynamic range to a narrow one so that conventional monitors can reproduce them and dynamically manipulate the appearance of scenes for stylistic effect.
This effect hardly affects the quality of the image, but there should definitely be locations that take full advantage of it (some levels and multiplayer maps with different lighting conditions were missing in the pre-release version). However, the impact on performance is just as insignificant (0.4 fps on Ultra), so you can set the setting to maximum for the rare moments when its effect will be noticeable.
Refractions
Turning on Refractions distorts light coming through water and glass. The effect is clearly visible in some videos, near the water pouring from above, when looking at the surface of reservoirs and at the engines of flying enemies.
Performance: Refractions takes a maximum of 2.2 fps, but this is a rare effect that has almost no effect on overall performance.
Scaled resolution
When this option is enabled, the game is rendered in high, detailed resolution, and subsequently the picture is adjusted to the monitor resolution; as a result, everything looks sharper and sharper. If the computer allows, you can set a scalable resolution of 7680 × 4320 - 400% of the most popular 1920 × 1080.
As mentioned, Scaled Resolution can be paired with Dynamic Resolution Scaling to enhance image quality without sacrificing performance during the most demanding moments of the game.
Screen Space Reflections
Surfaces and objects in Gears of War 4 reflect light and their surroundings, although in many cases these are pre-rendered effects powered by the Lighting Texture Detail setting, or they are reflections that Environment Reflections is responsible for.
Dynamic screen-space reflections reflect characters, effects, and other game elements in puddles, bodies of water, and shiny surfaces within the area the player sees. For example, in the comparison below, the effect of a shot, smoke from a bullet, a character, objects against the wall and glowing cocoons in the corner are reflected on a wet floor.
Increasing the setting gradually improves the clarity and accuracy of reflections, and removes the jitter seen at low resolutions. Finally, the Insane value brings reflections to a new level of realism, blurring as the distance from the reflected object increases. These reflections are more detailed and affect more surfaces. See example below.
Performance: Low and Ultra share 6 fps, and we recommend setting High if Ultra is too demanding for you: High is only 0.5 fps slower than Medium, but looks much better and is 1.3 fps faster than Ultra (by ~ 4 fps at 4K). Insane is 38 frames per second slower than Ultra, and at higher resolutions the spread is even greater. At the same time, everything looks great, but only owners of the most powerful video cards should set the maximum value.
Screen space shadow quality
This is a new technology from Unreal Engine 4.13, debuting in Gears of War 4. It adds an impressive amount of detail to shadows on foliage, small objects on the ground, rocks and other game elements in the player's field of view.
If The Coalition used exclusively cascading shadow maps, their quality would have to be significantly increased, making the picture available thanks to Screen Space Shadow Quality, and, of course, this would have a strong impact on performance. Thanks to a new technique that complements other shadow settings, it became possible to improve their display without unnecessarily increasing the demands of the game.
If Gears of War crashes, Gears of War will not start, Gears of War not installing, controls not working in Gears of War, no sound in game, errors happen in Gears of War, saves not working - we suggest you the most common ways to solve these problems.
First, check if your PC meets the minimum system requirements:
- System: Windows XP (with Service Pack 2 installed) or Vista;
- Processor: 2.4 GHz;
- RAM: 1 GB;
- Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 / ATI X700;
- Sound card compatible with DirectX 9.0c;
- 12 GB of free hard disk space;
- DirectX 9.0c.
Be sure to update your graphics card drivers and other software
Before remembering the worst words and expressing them towards the developers, do not forget to go to the official website of the manufacturer of your video card and download the latest drivers. Often, specially optimized drivers are prepared for the release of games. You can also try installing a later version of the drivers if the problem is not resolved by installing the current version.
It is important to remember that you should only download the final versions of video cards - try not to use beta versions, as they may contain a large number of not found and not fixed errors.
Keep in mind that games often require the latest version of DirectX to be installed, which can always be downloaded from the Microsoft official website, for stable operation.
Gears of War not starting
Many problems with the launch of games happen due to incorrect installation. Check if there were any errors during the installation, try uninstalling the game and running the installer again, after disabling the antivirus - files that are often needed for the game to work are deleted by mistake. It is also important to remember that the path to the folder with the installed game should not contain Cyrillic characters - use only Latin letters and numbers for directory names.
It still does not hurt to check if there is enough space on the HDD for installation. You can try to run the game as Administrator in compatibility mode with different versions of Windows.
Gears of War crashes. Low FPS. Lags. Friezes. Hangs
First, install fresh drivers on the video card, from this the FPS in the game can significantly increase. Also check the workload of the computer in the task manager (opened by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + ESCAPE). If, before starting the game, you see that a process is consuming too many resources, turn off its program or simply end this process from the task manager.
Next, go to the graphics settings in the game. First, turn off anti-aliasing and try lowering the post-processing settings. Many of them consume a lot of resources and turning them off will significantly increase performance without significantly affecting the picture quality.
Gears of War crashes to the desktop
If Gears of War often crashes to the desktop, try to reduce quality of the graphics. It is possible that your computer simply lacks performance and the game may not work correctly. It's also worth checking out the updates - most modern games have a system for automatically installing new patches. Check if this option is disabled in the settings.
Black of black screen in the Gears of War
The most common black screen issue is a GPU issue. Check if your graphics card meets the minimum requirements and install the latest drivers. Sometimes a black screen is due to insufficient CPU performance.
If everything is fine with the hardware and it meets the minimum requirements, try switching to another window (ALT + TAB), and then returning to the game window.
Gears of War is not installed. Installation hangs
First of all, check if you have enough HDD space for installation. Remember that for the installation program to work correctly, the declared amount of space is required, plus 1-2 gigabytes of free space on the system drive. In general, remember the rule - the system disk should always have at least 2 gigabytes of free space for temporary files. Otherwise, both games and programs may not work correctly or refuse to start at all.
Installation problems can also occur due to a lack of internet connection or instability. Also, do not forget to suspend the antivirus during the installation of the game - sometimes it interferes with the correct copying of files or deletes them by mistake, considering it as viruses.
Saves not working in Gears of War
By analogy with the previous solution, check the availability of free space on the HDD - both on the one where the game is installed and on the system disk. Often, save files are stored in the documents folder, which is located separately from the game itself.
Controls not working in Gears of War
Sometimes in-game controls do not work due to the simultaneous connection of multiple input devices. Try disconnecting your controller, or if for some reason you have two keyboards or mice connected, leave only one pair of devices. If your controller does not work, then remember - officially only controllers that are defined as Xbox joysticks support games. If your controller is defined differently, try using programs that emulate Xbox joysticks (for example, x360ce).
Sound does not work in Gears of War
Check if the sound works in other programs. After that, check if the sound is muted in the settings of the game itself and if the sound playback device to which your speakers or headset is connected is selected. Next, while the game is running, open the mixer and check if the sound is muted there.
If you are using an external sound card, check the manufacturer's website for new drivers.
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Unfortunately, there are flaws in games: brakes, low FPS, crashes, freezes, bugs and other minor and not so much errors. Often, problems begin even before the start of the game, when it is not installed, downloaded or even downloaded. And the computer itself sometimes freaks out, and then in Gears of War, instead of a picture, a black screen, controls do not work, sound is not heard or anything else.
What to do first
- Download and run the world famous CCleaner(download by direct link) is a program that cleans your computer of unnecessary garbage, as a result of which the system will work faster after the first reboot;
- Update all drivers in the system using the program Driver Updater(download by direct link) - it will scan your computer and update all drivers to the latest version in 5 minutes;
- Install the program WinOptimizer(download by direct link) and enable Game Mode in it, which will terminate useless background processes during the launch of games and increase the performance in the game.
The second thing to do if you have any problems with GeoW is to check the system requirements. In an amicable way, you need to do this even before buying, so as not to regret the money spent.
Gears of War minimum system requirements:
Windows XP, Pentium 4, 1 Gb RAM, 12 Gb HDD, nVidia GeForce 6600
Every gamer should at least understand a little about the components, know why a video card, processor and other things in the system unit are needed.
Files, drivers and libraries
Almost every device in a computer requires a set of special software. These are drivers, libraries and other files that ensure the correct operation of the computer.
It's worth starting with the drivers for the video card. Modern graphics cards are made by only two major companies - Nvidia and AMD. Having found out which product is spinning the coolers in the system unit, we go to the official website and download the package of fresh drivers:
A prerequisite for the successful functioning of GeoW is the availability of the latest drivers for all devices in the system. Download the utility Driver Updater to quickly and easily download the latest drivers and install them with one click:
If Gears of War does not start, we recommend that you try to disable your antivirus or put the game in the antivirus exceptions, as well as check the system requirements again, and if something from your assembly does not match, then, if possible, improve your PC by purchasing more powerful accessories.
Gears of War has black screen, white screen, color screen. Solution
Problems with screens of different colors can be roughly divided into 2 categories.
First, they are often associated with the use of two video cards at once. For example, if your motherboard has an integrated video card, but you are playing on a discrete one, then Gears of War can be launched for the first time on the integrated one, and you will not see the game itself, because the monitor is connected to a discrete video card.
Secondly, color screens are used when there are problems with displaying images on the screen. This can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, GeoW cannot work through an outdated driver or does not support a video card. Also, a black / white screen may appear when running at resolutions that are not supported by the game.
Gears of War crashes. At a certain or random moment. Solution
You play for yourself, play and then - bam! - everything goes out, and now you have a desktop in front of you without any hint of a game. Why is this happening? To solve the problem, it is worth trying to figure out what kind of problem the problem is.
If the crash occurs at a random moment in time without any regularity, then with a probability of 99% we can say that this is a mistake of the game itself. In such a case, fixing something is very difficult, and the best thing is to just put Gears of War aside and wait for the patch.
However, if you know exactly at what moments the crash occurs, then you can continue the game, avoiding situations that provoke a failure.
However, if you know exactly at what moments the crash occurs, then you can continue the game, avoiding situations that provoke a failure. You can also download the Gears of War save game and bypass the departure location.
GeoW freezes. The picture freezes. Solution
The situation is about the same as with crashes: many freezes are directly related to the game itself, or rather to a developer's error when creating it. However, often a frozen picture can become a starting point for investigating the deplorable state of a video card or processor.
So if the picture freezes in Gears of War, then use programs to display statistics on the loading of components. Perhaps your video card has already exhausted its working resource a long time ago, or is the processor warming up to dangerous temperatures?
The easiest way to check the load and temperatures for the graphics card and processors is in MSI Afterburner. If desired, you can even display these and many other parameters over the GeoW image.
What temperatures are dangerous? Processors and graphics cards have different operating temperatures. For video cards, they are usually 60-80 degrees Celsius. Processors have a little lower - 40-70 degrees. If the processor temperature is higher, then you should check the state of the thermal paste. It may have dried out already and needs to be replaced.
If the video card is warming up, then you should use the driver or the official utility from the manufacturer. It is necessary to increase the number of revolutions of the coolers and check if the operating temperature drops.
Gears of War crashes. Low FPS. Frame rate drawdowns. Solution
With lags and low frame rates in Gears of War, the first step is to lower the graphics settings. Of course, there are many of them, so before lowering everything in a row, it is worth finding out exactly how certain settings affect performance.
Screen resolution... In short, this is the number of points from which the picture of the game is formed. The higher the resolution, the higher the load on the video card. However, the increase in load is insignificant, so you should only lower the screen resolution as a last resort, when everything else no longer helps.
Texture quality... Typically, this parameter determines the resolution of the texture files. The texture quality should be reduced if the video card has a small amount of video memory (less than 4 GB) or if a very old hard disk is used with a spindle speed lower than 7200.
Model quality(sometimes just detailing). This setting determines which set of 3D models will be used in the game. The higher the quality, the more polygons. Accordingly, high-poly models require more processing power of the video card (not to be confused with the amount of video memory!), Which means that this parameter should be reduced on video cards with a low core or memory frequency.
Shadows... They are implemented in different ways. In some games, shadows are created dynamically, that is, they are rendered in real time every second of the game. Such dynamic shadows load both the processor and the video card. For optimization purposes, developers often abandon full-fledged rendering and add pre-rendered shadows to the game. They are static, because in fact they are just textures overlaid on top of the main textures, which means they load memory, and not the core of the video card.
Often, developers add additional settings related to shadows:
- Shadow Resolution - Determines how detailed the shadow cast by the object will be. If there are dynamic shadows in the game, it loads the video card core, and if a previously created render is used, it "eats" the video memory.
- Soft Shadows - smoothing out unevenness on the shadows themselves, usually this option is given together with dynamic shadows. Regardless of the type of shadows, it loads the video card in real time.
Smoothing... It allows you to get rid of ugly corners at the edges of objects by using a special algorithm, the essence of which is usually to generate several images at once and compare them, calculating the "smoothest" picture. There are many different anti-aliasing algorithms that differ in the level of impact on Gears of War's performance.
For example, MSAA works head-on, creating 2, 4 or 8 renders at once, so the frame rate is reduced by 2, 4 or 8 times, respectively. Algorithms such as FXAA and TAA operate a little differently, achieving a smoother image by calculating only the edges and using some other tweaks. As a result, they do not degrade performance as much.
Lighting... As with anti-aliasing, there are different algorithms for lighting effects: SSAO, HBAO, HDAO. They all use the resources of the video card, but they do it differently depending on the video card itself. The fact is that the HBAO algorithm was promoted mainly on video cards from Nvidia (GeForce line), so it works best on "green" ones. HDAO, on the other hand, is optimized for AMD video cards. SSAO is the simplest type of lighting, it consumes the least resources, so in case of brakes in GeoW it is worth switching it.
What to reduce first? Shadows, anti-aliasing and lighting effects tend to work the most, so it's best to start with these.
Often, gamers themselves have to do the optimization of Gears of War. For almost all major releases, there are various relevant forums and forums where users share their ways to improve productivity.
One of them - a special program called WinOptimizer... It is made especially for those who do not want to manually clean up the computer from various temporary files, delete unnecessary registry entries and edit the startup list. WinOptimizer will do this on its own, as well as analyze the computer to identify how you can improve the performance in applications and games.
Gears of War lags. Big game lag. Solution
Many people confuse "brakes" with "lags", but these problems have completely different reasons. Gears of War slows down when the frame rate at which the picture is displayed on the monitor drops, and lags when the latency when accessing the server or any other host is too high.
That is why "lags" can only be in network games. The reasons are different: bad network code, physical distance from servers, network congestion, incorrectly configured router, low speed of the Internet connection.
However, the latter happens less often. In online games, communication between the client and the server takes place through the exchange of relatively short messages, so even 10 MB per second should be enough for the eyes.
No sound in GeoW. I can not hear anything. Solution
Gears of War works, but somehow it doesn't sound - this is another problem that gamers face. Of course, you can play this way, but it's still better to figure out what the matter is.
The first step is to determine the scale of the problem. Where exactly is there no sound - only in the game or in general on the computer? If only in the game, then perhaps this is due to the fact that the sound card is very old and does not support DirectX.
If there is no sound at all, then the matter is unambiguously in setting up the computer. Perhaps the sound card drivers are installed incorrectly, or maybe there is no sound due to some specific error of our beloved Windows OS.
Controls not working in Gears of War. Gears of War cannot see my mouse, keyboard, or gamepad. Solution
How to play if it is impossible to control the process? The problems of supporting specific devices are irrelevant here, because we are talking about familiar devices - a keyboard, mouse and controller.
Thus, errors in the game itself are practically excluded, almost always the problem is on the user's side. You can solve it in different ways, but, one way or another, you will have to contact the driver. Usually, when connecting a new device, the operating system immediately tries to use one of the standard drivers, but some models of keyboards, mice, and gamepads are not compatible with them.
Thus, you need to find out the exact model of the device and try to find exactly its driver. Often, devices from well-known gaming brands come with their own software kits, since the standard Windows driver simply cannot ensure the correct operation of all the functions of a device.
If you don't want to look for drivers for all devices separately, then you can use the program Driver Updater... It is designed to automatically search for drivers, so you just need to wait for the scan results and load the necessary drivers in the program interface.
It is not uncommon for the brakes in Gears of War to be caused by viruses. In this case, it makes no difference how powerful the video card is in the system unit. You can check your computer and clean it of viruses and other unwanted software using special programs. For example NOD32. The antivirus has proven itself to be the best and has received the approval of millions of users around the world.
ZoneAlarm is suitable for both personal use and small business, able to protect a computer running Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP from any attacks: phishing, viruses, malware, spyware and other cyber threats ... New users receive a 30-day free trial.
Nod32 is an anti-virus from ESET, which has received many awards for its contribution to the development of security. On the developer's website, versions of antivirus programs are available for both PCs and mobile devices, a 30-day trial version is provided. There are special conditions for business.
Gears of War downloaded from torrent does not work. Solution
If the distribution kit of the game was downloaded via torrent, then in principle there can be no guarantees of work. Torrents and repacks are almost never updated through official applications and do not work over the network, because in the course of hacking, hackers cut out all network functions from games that are often used to verify licenses.Using such versions of games is not only inconvenient, but even dangerous, because very often many files are changed in them. For example, pirates modify an EXE file to bypass protection. At the same time, no one knows what else they are doing with it. Perhaps they are embedding self-executing software. For example, which, when the game is first launched, will integrate into the system and use its resources to ensure the welfare of hackers. Or, giving access to the computer to third parties. There are no guarantees here and cannot be.
In addition, the use of pirated versions is, according to our publication, theft. The developers have spent a lot of time creating the game, investing their own funds in the hope that their creation will pay off. And every work must be paid.
Therefore, if you encounter any problems with games downloaded from torrents or hacked using one or another means, you should immediately remove the "pirate", clean your computer with antivirus and a licensed copy of the game. This will not only save you from questionable software, but also allow you to download updates for the game and receive official support from its creators.
(game) throws an error about the missing DLL file. Solution
As a rule, problems associated with missing DLLs occur at startup (game), but sometimes the game can access certain DLLs in the process and, not finding them, crash in the most insolent way.
To fix this error, you need to find the DLL you need and install it on your system. The easiest way to do this is with the program DLL-fixer, which scans the system and helps to quickly find the missing libraries.
If your problem turned out to be more specific, or the method described in this article did not help, then you can ask other users in our "" section. They will help you promptly!
We thank you for your attention!