Gears 5 PC Performance Explored – Rev Up Those Lancers!

The Coalition is back with the Gears of War series, but this time they've dropped the 'of War' so I guess war does change sometimes. Our review for Gears 5 isn't up yet but when it is we'll link it so you can easily find it if that was what you were looking for.  Here we'll be looking at Gears 5 PC performance and how the cards I have in office stack, up.  Gears 5 is a bit of an interesting one from a release standpoint as it released on Xbox as well as the multiple stores on the PC; Steam as well as the Xbox PC App and Windows Store.

Testing Methodology

For our testing, we are using the Xbox PC app version that came along with my Xbox Live Ultimate Subscription. Because of this, we are limited to DX12 Fullscreen but not having the ability to use exclusive fullscreen which can impact performance somewhat but without the ability to change that then the performance is what it is, hopefully, that'll get updated one day.   We tested Gears 5 using the in-game benchmark but used FrameView to capture the frametime output and then used our same tool as usual to extract AVG FPS, 1% Low, and .1% Low frame rates.  For those who want to use OCAT, Presentmon, or FrameView be aware that MsBetweenDisplayChangeActual =/= MsBetweenPresents as when running a DX12 program in a non-exclusive format will send MsBetweenPresents on a triple buffering like pacing, often causing performance to look the same across multiple cards only because of the way DX12 and Windows is handling the screen, odd but if you're running a variable refresh rate panel then you'll likely see MsBetweenDisplayChangeActual = MsBetweenPresents so long as you stay within the variable refresh rate window. The in-game benchmark is quite a bit more taxing than typical gameplay and will represent some of the lowest performance you'll see in the game, you will see performance like this in the game just not always.

With that out of the way we used the Ultra Preset but made one change as the Animation Quality is set to "Auto" but we changed it to "Best" and when running these tests I do not let variable settings take effect if at all possible. The below screenshots show the entirety of the settings we used for the testing of Gears 5, outside of the resolution of course.

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Test System

Components	Z370
CPU	Intel Core i9-9900k @ 5GHz
Memory	16GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200
Motherboard	EVGA Z370 Classified K
Storage	Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe SSD
PSU	Cooler Master V1200 Platinum
Windows Version	1903 with latest security patches

Graphics Cards Tested

GPU	Architecture	Core Count	Clock Speed	Memory Capacity	Memory Speed
NVIDIA RTX 2080ti FE	Turing	4352	1350/1635	11GB GDDR6	14Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER FE	Turing	3072	1650/1815	8GB GDDR6	15.5Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER FE	Turing	2560	1605/1770	8GB GDDR6	14Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER	Turing	2176	1470/1650	8GB GDDR6	14Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2060 FE	Turing	1904	1365/168	6GB GDDR6	14Gbps
ZOTAC Gaming GTX 1660	Turing	1408	1530/1785	6GB GDDR5	8Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1080 FE	Pascal	2560	1607/1733	8GB GDDR5X	10Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1070 FE	Pascal	1920	1506/1683	8GB GDDR5	8Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1060 FE 6GB	Pascal	1280	1506/1708	6GB GDDR5	8Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 5700XT	Navi	2560	1605/1755/1905	8GB GDDR6	14Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 5700	Navi	2304	1465/1625/1725	8GB GDDR6	14Gbps
AMD RX Vega 64	Vega 10	4096	1247/1546	8GB HBM2	945Mbps
AMD RX Vega 56	Vega 10	3584	1156/1471	8GB HBM2	800Mbs
MSI RX 580 Armor 8GB	Polaris 20	2304	1366	8GB GDDR5	8Gbps
Sapphire Nitro+ RX 570 4GB	Polaris 20	2048	1340	4GB GDDR5	7Gbps

Drivers Used

Drivers
Radeon Settings	19.9.1
GeForce	436.30

Preset Scaling At 4K

Testing presets at 4K gives us a couple of quick metrics before diving into the game too deeply.  First off it shows us how the game looks at various presets as well as how performance scales with those settings.  Gears 5 does a better job of squeezing out more performance from the "Low" setting than most games I've tested recently, but the image quality is clearly low.  But seeing as how it more than double the frame rate from the Ultra setting if you find yourself on older hardware it at least offers you the ability to give it a go, however at this point you're better off running it on an Xbox because those textures are ugly!  The "Medium preset has an obvious improvement to image quality but at the trade-off of a pretty big hit to performance, one I would be willing to take for the improvement.  Moving up to "High" doesn't appear to have a major impact when playing, but when looking back you actually see that there are assets now in the game that were missing from the lower settings, take note of the drain grates on the street for example. Moving to "Ultra" is most evident in the lighting of the game and how it reacts to the world, honestly, I would find it nearly impossible to see the difference between "High" and "Ultra" when the game is in motion.

Intel Core Scaling Performance

While this test won’t tell just how many cores and threads the game can and will use, it does show how the game performs as you move up in cores and threads available. These were tested at the 1080p settings that we tested the rest of the results while pairing the CPU with the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition.  You'll notice a new 4th bar in this chart and that's the GPU Bound % number indicating how much of the performance is bound by the GPU so that you can actually see the dropoff, this was part of the conclusion from the in-game benchmark and when it is available from the games I will be including it as it's a good quick visual to see where things are really bottlenecked.

In Gears 5 we see that bringing more to the table doesn’t necessarily mean more frames. Once you hit 4 cores and 8 threads the improvement is modest at best and shows the game leans very heavily on the GPU for its performance. While at least a 4 core 8 threaded part would be ideal we have to keep in mind that this is at 1080p with the highest end gaming graphics card, so even a basic quad core will serve anyone with a midrange card adequetly.  The most curious take-away is the fact that this game will even run at all on a Dual-Core, while that makes me sigh a bit at least those still clinging on aren't locked out of this one.

Graphics Card Results

1080p

Ultrawide 1080p

1440p

Ultrawide 1440p

UHD 4K

Conclusion

Before I get too far into the conclusion, I want to reiterate that the in-game benchmark is quite a bit more taxing than typical gameplay and will represent some of the lowest performance you'll see in the game, you will see performance like this in the game just not always.  That said, Gears 5 shook things up quite a bit in the way graphics cards stack up and how they handle this game.  The team over at Radeon gave some deep attention to their Navi based 5700 Series when it comes to average framerates as they're miles ahead of the Vega cards, unfortunately they still mimic previous generations when it comes to 1% and .1% performance.  Radeon does show some strong numbers in the lower mid-range with good performance on the RX 580 and RX 570.  GeForce performance is an interesting one with Pascal bringing more to the table than I expected while Turing brings much tighter performance between the average and bottom frame rates resulting in a typically smoother experience.  Overall, everyone is performing in this one and the game looks great at higher detail settings and as long as you're not pushing the frame buffer of your graphics cards outside of its walls then you're going to find yourself in a good place with Gears 5. So everyone, rev up your Lancers and get ready to Roadie Run!