We said last week that Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was expected to be out in March. And we were right! Today is March 1, and GoW:UE is now available for purchase on the Windows Store.
Objects in the “new” Gears have been “uprezzed” by ten to 30 percent, The Coalition Technical Director Cam McRae said on the Xbox Wire, while character models have had their poly count doubled. Textures are also much more detailed, which McRae explained is mainly due to DirectX 12, because it “allows developers to more efficiently harness the multiple cores in today's higher-end processors.”
“One of our goals with the PC version was, 'Don't touch the art',” McRae said. “But beyond that, we changed everything.”
In spite of all the improvements, alas, the PC release of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition appears to be plagued with technical issues. A list of problems posted on the Gears forums includes downloads that appear to have stalled, sub-par performance on AMD GPUs, lack of support for Nvidia's G-Sync technology—running with it enabled “will cause significant performance issues”—and a strong recommendation that Ambient Occlusion be disabled on AMD graphics cards until a fix can be released.
On the upside, the Windows update released earlier today fixes the stalled download bar problem.
As we've already established, Gears Ultimate requires Windows 10, among other things, and of course is exclusive to the Windows Store. It will set you back $30.
