Digital Foundry's Gears of War 4 Tech Interview is online, discussing the
next installment in the shooter series. There is
an earlier article on Eurogamer focusing on some of the details about plans
for a PC edition, suggesting it won't be an afterthought this time around
(thanks
VG247). Here are some of the excerpted comments from Mike Rayner, technical
director for The Coalition
"Our focus on PC is to deliver a highly
optimised, customisable experience first and foremost," Rayner tells us.
"Support for v-sync tearing has recently come to UWP and we will be able to
offer proper unlocked frame-rate support that gamers expect on day one. With
Unreal Engine 4 and our own custom modifications, we can take much better
advantage of multiple CPU cores, alleviating the game from being CPU-bound and
allowing more room for the GPU to shine with enhanced visual quality or higher
framerates. Single-player will not be locked to 30fps on PC."
Our analysis of the Gears of War E3 stage demo shows a rock-solid 30fps
presentation at full 1080p resolution. The demo was confirmed by The Coalition
as running on Xbox One hardware, and it looks as though the developers are
repurposing console features in intriguing ways for the PC version.
Rayner also listed "a few items of note" the team are adding to the PC version.
In his own words:
- Dynamic resolution support (any resolution will be
supported with a sensible dynamic field of view - including ultra-wide).
- Increased texture resolution (up to 4K resolution
for select texture groups).
- A benchmark mode.
- Full keyboard/mouse input remapping (including
cover/run and roll split).
- Far more comprehensive video settings.
"Today we sit at 28 different settings and we're thinking of ways to add more
for people to really have full control," Rayner tells us. "Along with more
settings, we're putting extra time into making it clear what impact a setting
will have on GPU/CPU/VRAM so there is a clear correlation between a setting
change and its performance impact."