Gears of War PC

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 8th November 2007
Comments (38) Stumble

Graphics of Awe

Gears for the Xbox 360 was, just like pretty much every Epic game ever, utterly beautiful. Textures were crisp, levels were detailed but without needless clutter, explosions looked fantastic and the motion blur was so good that even if it made you run away and throw up then you’d still like it.

Given that the PC is a more powerful machine than the 360, provided you plug in the right bits anyway, the question then isn’t how good are the graphics in the PC version? The question is; how much better are the graphics in the PC version.

With plenty of graphics settings to look at, as well as DirectX 10 support, we’ve created a quick run down of what different levels of awesomeness you can expect to get out of the game with your rig. Check out the pictures and explanations below.

Texture Detail

Textures are, in my opinion, the most important single graphical setting in the game. In fact, it’s probably the most important setting in most games. Pretty much everything that a player looks at has a texture on it and, if that texture looks like a Brumak wiped his arse on it then the whole game is going to look a bit crap.

If, on the other hand, the textures are interesting and well-detailed, then the game will look better than ever. There are five settings for texture quality in Gears PC; Highest, High, Medium, Low and Lowest. We’ve got pictures of the two extremes and the middle setting below.

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Texture Detail Highest (left), Medium (center) and Lowest (right), click to enlarge

So, what do we think of the textures? Firstly, ignore the brightness caused by the cloud cover moving about. The Highest texture setting looks very nice and, although the Unreal Engine 3 often has an odd shiny effect on some surfaces, the floor here still looks great.

Moving down to the Medium setting, the textures still look good – not great, but good. There’s still plenty of detail on the surfaces and the textures are more than enough to get by. Bumping down to the lowest setting though the game starts to look a lot more ugly and the textures looks like they’ve been embossed slightly in order to make up for a lack of detail. Do yourself a favour and push the texture setting as high as you can.

Character Detail

The character detail is an odd setting because, the more screenshots I took, the more it became obvious that the impressive amount of detail on the characters was more to do with texture than number of polygons. There are three settings in character detail; High, Medium and Low.

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Character Detail High (left), Medium (center) and Low (right), click to enlarge

In this picture of Dom from the very start of the game it’s still easily possible to see the fine details of his character on the lower settings. You can see everything right down to the veins bulging out of his arm, the big show-off. In fact, the textures make up so much of the detail that I can’t honestly point to a specific difference in the character details – not one that I could see in the game and not one I can see in these screenshots.

Turn the character detail setting up to maximum if you can obviously, or if you just want to waggle your e-peen. Otherwise, there’s nothing to be ashamed of if you have to force the setting down in order to get extra performance from the game when the texture detail is set to highest.

Next, flip the page and we’ll look at the effect of DX10 on the UE3 engine…

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