Gears of War 4 developer The Coalition has finally revealed the game’s Xbox One X enhancements, and chief among them is the ability to play both the story campaign and Horde mode at a frame rate of “up to [60 frames per second].”
That’s twice the frame rate of Gears 4 on a standard Xbox One or Xbox One S, where the campaign and Horde mode run at 30 frames per second in 1080p resolution. This is a welcome improvement, since most developers delivering enhancements like this tend to focus on smoothing out the frame rate rather than bumping it all the way up to 60 fps. (Crystal Dynamics’ Rise of the Tomb Raider, which offers three different visual modes on both the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro, is an outlier in this respect.)
Xbox One X owners who choose to play Gears 4 in Performance mode will get 1080p resolution with a 60 fps target, as well as higher-resolution textures and “some of the new enhanced graphical features available in Visuals mode,” according to The Coalition. The Visuals mode leaves the frame rate at 30 fps for campaign and Horde, but quadruples the resolution to 4K (3840x2160), uses ultra-quality textures, and includes “a wealth of new and improved graphical features.” Here’s the list of graphical improvements:
- enhanced light shafts (aka “god rays”)
- dynamic shadows
- increased draw distances
- better reflections
- increased texture detail on character models
Gears 4’s competitive multiplayer component, Versus mode, will run at 60 fps in 4K resolution on an Xbox One X — with adaptive resolution scaling to maintain that frame rate — regardless of whether a player has selected Performance or Visuals mode. (That’s quadruple the resolution of Versus mode on a regular Xbox One, where the multiplayer runs at 1080p60.)
The free Xbox One X update for Gears 4 will be available alongside the console’s worldwide launch on Nov. 7.
