Gears of War PC Original vs Intel Q6600/Nvidia 8800 GT: Original Hardware Performance Analysis!
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- It's a game that's been almost lost to the world - simply because getting it to work and install properly is so incredibly difficult. But somehow we did it and in this Retro PC playtest, we analyse the original PC port of Gears of War - Games for Windows and all! - running on the hardware of the day, represented in this case with a nice Dell PC running a Q6000 CPU and GeForce 8800GT. Classic game, classic rig - so just how well did it actually run at launch?
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It hurts when your pet dies, it hurts when your favorite game is a Stadia exclusive, unrequited love hurts as well... but nothing hurts as much as hearing Alex referring to John as a mere collegue
Literally shaking rn
Ya literally crying and shaking
😭
It’s like Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters
Didn't John refer to Alex as a colleague first several videos ago?
I remember a friend getting a 360 and I went over to watch him play Gears 1. The water effects, especially water dripping onto the characters, was mind-blowing to see back in the day.
Yeah i think this and gta4 were the first next gen games that felt like they couldn't have run on a ps2/xbox
Jason definitely it was next level
Got this game as a gift along with forza and fuck yeah it was awesome
You will be mind blown to see PC Gears of War running on highest quality on an Nvidia GeForce 6800GT 256MB graphics card then.
@@apollosungod2819 Not really. It's the same thing just looking slightly cleaner..
When you saved the INI file, it was recorded with the current date. Gears on the PC had a problem with an expired library certificate, try transferring the time to the PC for November-December 2007 no later and save the INI file and start the game.
This is hilarious, no way
Did it work DF?
I am only surprised by how little this would surprise me
If that's correct please put it into the PC Gaming Wiki.
I'm pretty sure they fixed that. I think he had to switch the 'smoothframerate' back to TRUE to get it working again. Anyway, welcome to PC gaming indeed.
That 'Mad World' trailer is one of the best pieces of video game advertising ever made.
The commercial made my hair stand up
I saw it in a movie theater when I first saw it before a movie. Still a gears fan
directed by joseph kosinski, the same guy who made the new Top Gun movie and Tron: Legacy
Gears of War was one of those games where it took my eyes awhile to be able to get used to the amount of texture and resolution definition. It was just like sensory overload to me at the time. Now it seems quaint of course, but it really was mind blowing back in the day.
Nah, it was just shit.
The detail in that game was jarring for sure, but not necessarily in a bad way.
Probably one of the earlier games of that gen that actually felt like next-gen and personally, it only happened for me until I saw RE4 on the GameCube for the first time before that.
I’ll never forget the E3 trailer with the Berserker smashing through the wall
@@juicemanvon9859 Resident Evil 4 came out a year before Gears.
Maxing out the anisotropic filtering made it look much clearer.
Get someone that looks at you the same way Alex and John look at ground textures
Life goals
I like how Gears 1 very much had its roots in horror games. It was still action, sure, but there was a distinct sense of dread and bleakness to the setting that the sequels kind of diluted with bombastic setpieces.
heh.. i still have the OG PC gears installed on my machine. Got it working with an unlocked framerate. Surprised Gearbox didn't make this one... has Gearbox port written all over it
Despite what people seem to say these days, the Gears of War saga is one of the greatest collection of games ever and should be revered just as much as Halo is.
dmj lol
I never played gears of war but I had friends that did and were obsessed with the game
Too bad that Gears of War Ultimate Edition online multiplayer is abandoned in both Xbox One and PC.
All third person shooters are abominations.
CHANGE MY MIND
Back in the day when I tried gears of war and I really didn't enjoy the gameplay, I know that the story is good, but I didn't enjoy the gameplay enough to get me to keep playing, and neither did my friends, and I don't think a halo comparison is fair, the only thing they have in common is they're xbox exclusives.
I remember back in the day how UE3 games on PC had a 62fps v-sync cap which was the dumbest shit ever as we were all running 60hz screens and always had tearing and you had to edit the .cfg file to set it to 60fps and fix it.
Yep, you can see that tearing even here, drives me insane
I very much enjoy the dual-commentary , unscripted videos you guys do, especially when you go off track and try messing around with things. Very entertaining and I learn a lot. More of these please.
“Did they have coop back then?”
- DF
Me: Was water wet in 2006?
Right, that was the biggest part of the experience to me. Split-screen co-op with my siblings/friends. Also, I've system linked on gears 1, 2, and 3 in co-op and multiplayer.
Damn! I hate the fact that the remake we got on the Windows Store is still an unplayable mess due to poor performance. I wish we could buy the original....
😥 Yeah it sucks
You aren't the only one. With a r5 1600 @ 3.9 and gtx 980 ti at 1080 the frame rate lurches between 30 and 60 constantly for no apparent reason -- i tested with the camera pointed at the floor and panned around in circles it still does the same thing.
Something broke somewhere in Windows or drivers. Originally the remake was quite broken but then again, it was one of the first DirectX12 titles on the market. it got fixed afterwards. Then got broken again.
Just pirate the original.
You can buy the original, just pick up a cheap 360.
One of the most impressive Unreal 3 games, early in the engine's life. However compared to most UE3 around the same time and later, Gears was incredibly heavy. Kind of ironic when the other UE3 game done by EPIC, Unreal Tournament 3, ran like butter. Also DirectX10 was pointless in UE3, only enabled MSAA, which made the game vastly heavier still. And Nvidia's HBAO+ driver implementation in Gears has been broken for all times. DX10 was also nonexistent in any other Unreal Engine 3 game as far as I'm aware (except for Thief 2014 which needed DX10 at least to run)
and unreal engine run like an ass always, batman atkham city is still stuttery mess with my ryzen 1600 4ghz and gtx 2060 super lol i had to uninstall, bioshock infinite, borderlands 2 same issue. graphically unreal engine always impressive no doubt about that but damn this engine cant stream texture fast enough im not sure why every single unreal engine games always stuttery mess, currently playing borderlands 3 same shit, it always stutter no matter how many tweaks i apply to fix the game, same with star wars fallen order, gears ultimate edition i cant even get steady 50 fps and dipping into mid 40 was horrible, i know 1600 ipc is not great but no way this cpu cant maintain 60 fps when others games such as battlefield 5 i play 64 players get 100+ fps easy on low with this cpu, modern warfare also run amazingly well never dip bellow 100 even 64 players ground way lowest dip 135 fps everything on low meaning this cpu is not that bad, low stress more cpu right, idk how microsoft optimize gears 5 so well and it use UE4 this is something make me wonder this is really this engine issue or dev cant figure out how to port their game with this engine
@@Ryzen-gh1en I think it was meant to be a console (Xbox 360) focused engine, that's why it's using a very low memory pool for streaming and stutters like ass when you change places or loads textures very slowly, also mouse aiming never felt good for me in any UE3 game, even with mouse smoothing/acceleration turned off, not to mention the arbitrary 62 fps limit by default, which is just dumb cause you can disable the limitation in the ini files, why just don't make an option in the game's menu ?
@@devostripes5964 UE4 games are still stutter hard, forget to mention the outer world mess lol. no way you get can rid of those problem completely no matter you play low setting and resolution or apply so many tweak inside your ini file, i have a rtx 2060 super and 768p old monitor and even very low setting i can get steady over 100+ fps in borderlands 3 lol is this a joke and hardly 40% gpu usages, with some tweak guide the game stutter less but still whenever i switch to heavy weapon it start to stutter like hell -_- fuck this engine man i want to finish star wars fallen order but constant stutter is super annoying so i stop played that shit :( lol 62 fps lock omg smooth framate lol my ass which cause more stutter, idk how i manage to completely remove borderlands 2 stutter thanks to low spec gamer, i had 1050ti that time and you need to disable everything order to enjoy the game fucking amazing and hardly that game use 2 core and nvidia stupid physx in unreal engine games batman arkham city, arkham origins which cause more stutter and nvidia never care to fix physx -_- wish EA use frostbite engine in fallen order rather then fucking UE4
Don't remember it being super heavy, Gears of War played at 60 fps on my C2D E4400 + GF 8800 GTS 640 mb, absolutely fantastic optimization.
@@stam1ska have you played gears ultimate edition which enhanced the graphics which is absolute trash, you can check even a titan xp back in days cant max out steady 60 fps all the time
You should do a DF Retro on the Stalker series.
This^
oh god please, yes!
and make sure to mention stalker - anomaly ;)
I couldn't get the vsync completely fixed or other things that wasn't fixed.
damn, im actually playing the game for my very first time and i would love to see how they react to it, please make it real
@@completelyretarded I had played it for a while. But I had kind of stopped for several reasons. But I will get back to it later.
23:54 thank you for making me scream like a little girl. I did not expect that XD
Yeah that scared the shit out of me.
Got me the first time and again when I clicked the Timestamp 😂
Yeah that got me as well lol.
Can you analyse Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl? Because it look amazing even now(2007), and Clear sky for example looks extremely realistic.
Ah yes, back when videogame developers discovered bloom.
yea and every game seemed like the Sun was about 3 meters away
Yeah some parts of gears of war and cod:world at war felt like staring at the sun shame i think games like uncharted later used it well
You got to play Perfect Dark Zero 2005 for the Xbox 360. Bloom effect overload. It must have been like crack to devs back then.
@@aceofhearts573 I think that Oblivion on the 360 took the bloom effect way to serious if I`m not mistaken :)
Q6600/Nvidia 8800 GT? That's literally what i use on my second computer right now xD
Oh god, finally someone is talking about my PC!!! :D
Lulz
Yeah my old PC had this but with the GTX instead of GT
I had this, but GTS Fatal1ty edition, instead.
@@nowonmetube I was dreaming of GTX, now every card is GTX :P
i have one such machine under my second desk here, but it has not been turned on in quite a while.
@@Starfals 😂😂😂
I remember downloading all those UE3 trailers when they were coming out, they looked absolutely stunning. The cuts to dynamic lighting for actual games back then reminds me of things like SVOGI being cut from UE4 at the start of this generation. They always seem to aim a little higher than the hardware can manage. Aside from the Hellblade 2 trailer we've not really seen anything like that for the next-gen machines. It's an oddly low key build up.
Oh yeah, now I remember that amazing original 'Fire Elemental' UE4 demo that was using SVOGI, and then it was cut from it, and never made it into shipped demo. Now I know what I'll be doing this evening - re-watching UE4 tech demos like a maniac (that I actually secretly am). :D
I used to mod for Gears of War 1 using the map editor on PC. That ground texture was using POM, I remember the texture editor flowchart and turning it on/off to see the difference. Texture always stood out for me. Think the game had a few other red brick surfaces use it too later in the game. I still remember all the early POM highlights back in the day (FEAR bullet impacts, GOW, and Perfect Dark Zero bricks!). I was so sad to see they didn't use POM at all in Gears of War 2. I remember the DX11 Crysis 2 update brought POM back later on. Such an underused underrated effect that seems to be finally catching on in the last couple years.
The most impressive fact I love about GOW on the Xbox 360 is that the console only had half a gigabyte of ram.
one of the best coop games of all time....played through the first 3 games on insane with a friend...some of the best times playing video games
11:47
"okay so there's 'scattered geometry' here -"
"Debris."
"...debris."
In all honesty the ending of this video was my general experience of PC gaming, and is what drove my to console gaming many years ago. However I sure its a lot better these days.
please keep this series going,its fun to watch and nostalgic seeing the games play on the then high end hardware,which made many budget gamers envious,just like myself.yet at the same time it's quite marvellous we have come so far that 12 core cpu is the norm now(thanks to AMD)
Played this on my trusty old HD4850 which was like 149$ in the summer of 2008, about half a year after this game’s release. Even back then PC gaming on a budget was amazing, and you didn’t even need close to a “monster PC”™️ to enjoy console games at higher resolutions and double the frame rates.
When i get a error like that, i cannot stop troubleshooting until it's fixed. So many times in the past, that i was busy for hours with an error and when i finally fixed it, i would boot the game up and play it for 5 minutes and be done. Getting the game to work again became the game, instead of actually playing the game.
Yeah, it kinda feels similarly for me nowadays a lot of the time, sadly... :-/
Can't wait to learn more about John's DOS PC adventure! Please let that become a full fledged DF Retro!
For your Uncharted 1 comparison at 11:10, you're actually using footage of the PS4 rerelease which changes Drake's head model. I'm pretty sure it's a bad port of his face from U3. Just saying, since your point here was to compare the original's graphical style to other games of its time and even show "2007" in the corner.
As a metal and core listener I love how you drop that references here and there.
I've just installed it on my Win10 machine that has a 3570k and RX570. Installed the game. Installed latest windows live. Booted up the game, created an offline profile and everything worked. Everything. And ran at a solid 62fps with the default cap. Only thing that didn't work was Vsync.
It's also weird how playable it is, even with mouse and keyboard. It still plays like the last 2 Gears games.
Was just playing this on x1 back compat and found people to play with online. Was a nostalgic night.
Why play this version on back compat instead of the remake? :D
@@raresmacovei8382 we were being nostalgic for 06 and ultimate (while awesome) isn't the OG game we wanted to play.
@@raresmacovei8382 I prefer the original look. They made the remake too bright looking, and it was pretty glitchy, especially on PC where 60fps is basically impossible.
I'm pure PC gaming but I love Gears so I had hoped the Ultimate Edition on Windows Store would be a master piece that I could enjoy it but turned out it was a Trash Can edition which unplayable on any rig
It was unplayable on my gaming laptop, until I had reinstall it. Which that fixed the performance issue.
@Ioannis Stefanakis The franchise is also shared on PC. Just like Halo.
Gears Ultimate is awesome, what are you on about with it being trash? The game is a semi remake of the 1st game and it looks and plays just as good.
@@azzaprime7257 Because it still doesn't run well on many PC today
@Ioannis Stefanakis Yeah but 30 fps and a controller no thanks. There's a superior version of Halo CE Classic on pc and Gears 5 looks and plays great.
I enjoyed the mention of Killswitch Engage.
It's amazing that Rise of the Tomb Raider came out on X360, and runs and looks like most other games on the system. Try running it on your retro PC 😉
I prefer tomb raider annivesry game come with 2007. It s remke of fisrt tomb raider which is 2nd best tomb raider game. Fisrt one list of course tomb raider 4 egypt. Its reay dump to new games goes ice or forest zone instead of actual tomp egypt. Assasins creed origin feel more tomb raider relly but pyramids insides not so deep bcause use real rooms.
Ahh yes, the crashing of the PC part was soo spot on. Thats not only the majority of the oldschool PC gaming experience, but it still happens today every now and then. This is pretty much what it is to be a PC gamer lol.
Fiding solutions for broken games, games breaking and crashing, pushing the hardware to the max etc ;p
You left the smooth frame rate as false when you tried to change the values lol. That used to stop the game from working on mine back in the day when I used to cap the frame rate under 60 so I didnt get tearing.
Back when Gears was dark and morbid and was actually loads of fun.
To be fair, all games from this era was dark and morbid. Probably too dark and morbid (just saying)
@@awsomeboy360 Yeah I remember Dark Sector which was close to Gears in some way. It was a good era for me.
@@F3NIXII Dark Sector(Love that game stil waiting for that proper sequel) was using Digital Extreme's own tech called Evolution Engine and while its tone looked similar I easily could spot a difference between these two games meanwhile all Unreal 3 games looked almost exactly the same. Thats a thing nowadays too you easily can spot which games are using Unreal 4 very easily no matter what art style devs use and its a reason why im not fond of that engine but I suppose its very easy to use and light on resources so thats why most developers go with it.
Post 9/11 world etc lots of media was "dark"
The world of GoW was so incredibly fresh and innovative in all mechanical, visual aspects to me at the time Ive finished it 3 times in a row just to ingest all the details it offered. Those were some sweet memories...
The ghost of games of Windows live 😂😂😂
I’ll never forget the E3 trailer with the Berserker smashing through the wall
Tip: If you want to know If It's Parallax Occlusion Map (on Shooters), shoot the texture, the bullet decal, even in recent games, never deform with POM, they always stay static.
I played Gears 1 multiplayer everyday for nearly 2 years. Execution, 5 second bleed time, no weapon swaps. To this day I haven't played any other game nearly as much by a long shot. The original Gears remains my favorite, I don't like the bastardized compilation version with the updated match making. Original is perfect ( apart from all the cheating :) )
Gridlock crab walk til I die
Now I wanna try this on my 7900 GT 😬
It’s similar to the PS3 GPU, but with much faster memory.
Me too with 6600gt. Cod 4 Dead space ac1 was ok but i doubht this will be ok or like crysis will be badly ok. It think before 2007 pc games more magical. These games eveyone knows due to consoles but games like stalker freelancer etc pc exlusive games no one knows. There are even amzing games before 2000 like nocturne bladerunner outcast etc. 6600gt very good to 97 to 2007 but before 97 due to dos i prefer sega saturn espcially sega games not good on pc ports. Playing game newrt than 2009 on old ssystem i think dump. Also for pc after 2008 games rqure steam. 2008 to 96 pc box games on retro way to go on win xp machine.
Hi Alex @DigitalFoundry - Could be wrong on this, but it could just be a text parsing error for the ini where you replaced an upper case "TRUE" with "False", and it failed because it should have been "FALSE" in caps.
didnt he save settings to a new .txt file ? Because he said "sure" then selected save, maybe the game got confused with the new file
This ini was secured, if exe detected change in ini, it throwed runtime error. Only cracked game was able to run modified ini files.
This is just so wholesome!
Guys you have no idea how happy I am watching this, I was always a huge Unreal Engine fan (and especially during late 2000s when early UE3 games came out), and now it just feels so good to travel down this memory lane again, it's incredible.
Back then I even haven't gotten myself an Internet, and all I was left with were various gaming magazines that we talked over so much at school. And Gosh, I was so sad seeing how those gorgeous visuals from early UE3 demos were cut off from Gears & UT3, but I still had an amazing time playing those nonetheless.
Ah, sweet sweet memories of good old times. Thank you kindly for this video!
They need to release a gears collection on pc like how 343 did for the mcc.
FYI: I'm pretty sure the runtime error was because the Windows Editor saved the .ini with a different character set (UTF8/ANSI/whatever) than the game needs. Something like Notepad++ is way better for stuff like that.
That would do it, MSVC of that time period could not handle UTF8 reliably at all. VS Code is probably a better go to editor these days, but Notepad++ is still great in a pinch
The ini was secured, if game exe file detected change in that file, it throwed runtime error. Only cracked game allowed you to run modified ini files.
Damnit guys! Because of this I just bought a boxed copy of this off eBay. Will be humorous if it actually runs, but I do have era-appropriate hardware to try it on. Always wanted to play the original Gears with keyboard and mouse.
God I love these videos it's like I get to actually step back in time. When I used a single core 512mb agp system jealous of the world.
I feel like Parallax Occlusion Mapping fell out of fashion over the last decade. I wonder why, as it seems like a relatively graphically cheap effect by modern standards compared to things like tesselation while still looking fantastic.
POM works kinda OK when it's used in forward rendering context, where it has access to all the light sources you want to consider and doesn't need to make physical sense in the intermediates, just visual sense. And it has absolutely hideous performance implications depending on resolution and view angle, so games had to be pretty selective about the surfaces where POM would be applied and very rigorous at keeping the camera off them a good distance and angle, so it's kinda very situational.
It tends to fall apart REALLY badly in deferred rendering, where you can't just output a rendered fragment but have to output intermediates for the grand unified lighting shader to make sense of.
@@SianaGearz I take it deferred rendering has become far more prevalent over the last console generation then? That's interesting if the performance cost doesn't scale well with resolution. Also interesting to hear about intermediate passes. I guess there's lots of reasons I don't understand why it's fallen out of use, good to know the reasons exist though!
I think it tends to hold up best for ground work or flat artificial types of surfaces in narrow spaces where the camera view isn't likely to approach the surface angle too closely, but I suppose once you see it, you don't un-see it.
It's surprising if the cost approaches or exceeds that of additional geometry though!
@@InnuendoXP Yes. Unreal Engine 3 was almost universally forward rendered - deferred DX11 pipe was available in experimental state. Xbox 360/PS3 gen was a mix of forward and deferred rendering techniques, but largely forward.
By the end of this gen, it's all nearly 100% deferred, even on Nintendo Switch. UE4 is deferred - forward pipe is pretty broken.
Well imagine the parallax occlusion mapping this way, it's like a bunch of parallax layers of offset texture slices beneath the surface, all carrying the same texture data, but the correct slice is chosen by height map, and POM tries to trace into this layer stack and find the ray-height-field collision without testing TOO too many times, so the maximum number of tests determines the number of slices that in the worst case can become distinguishable as discontinuities, steps - under grazing angles and high magnification, so in these cases, the number of permitted tests may need to be increased dramatically. There were however several ways how it was implemented, like 2006 Tatarchuk paper "Dynamic Parallax Occlusion Mapping with Approximate Soft Shadows" where she pretty much just searches along the view vector for an intersection by just hopping along it a few times, which is theoretically just crazy bad really, but for some reason they (ATI) found it was preferable to binary search. A few years later, cone tracing would emerge as an "obvious" solution to accelerate the search. Would be a lot less angle dependent, but then it still takes a bunch of steps.
Forward rendering doesn't scale very well in terms of CPU time and management workload. For just about every object, you need to reload the shaders depending on material and number and type of light sources that might affect this object, so you end up emitting shader loads, and the GPU caches get purged a lot. So it scales particularly badly with the number of light sources. With deferred, almost all object shaders become identical, and it doesn't matter how many objects a light affects, you just draw one light primitive (like a quad or whatever) per light that just bound the area of the light, and the light acts upon image size buffers of material properties.
Precomputed lighting also peaked and started dying that generation and is rare this generation. Probably in part specifically in conjunction with the freedom afforded by deferred rendering to use a large number of light sources that affect world and entities alike, and makes no distinction between either.
Kill.Switch soundtrack mod with Killswitch Engage songs inbound
Nice to see PC Gaming Wiki get a mention, it should be every PC gamers, goto site while the games downloading, installing, even if it's just to find out where to find saves, and config files.
In fact the older a game is, the more useful info the site will have, but even day one releases will have good info, and being a Wiki if you know something new, you can add it yourself.
Great vids, and as always, don’t Forget to back-up original ini files 🤣
or delete the files and let the game generate them again, sure he would have to change menu settings again yet hardly an issue
Best 'Gears of War' ever. The following titles never reached this fantastic gameplay...
This was the 1st game I played on my Samsung widescreen HD CRT... Was blown away... Still have that TV... 😁
HD crt are amazing. Want one so bad.
@@aceofhearts573 They were a bit faulty back then... They used cheap capacitors which would explode and damage other components... Had that happen to mine, but luckily didn't damage anything else... Capacitor literally caught on fire... I swapped out every capacitor for expensive solid ones and have never had an issue since... It's why so few exist now...
This brings back memories. I remember having almost the exact same system (although I built it myself and had an 8800GTX) and the game ran like a dream. Super smooth, tight controls and gameplay. I still have the physical DVD somewhere if I wanted to play it again, but the amount of work to get it running is probably not worth it. What saddens me is that the Ultimate Edition was so poorly created that it doesn't do the game justice. I have a Ryzen 7 (8 core 16 thread) with an MSI 3080 Ventus, and cranking the settings at 1080p has a hard time staying above 60fps.........and that's with vsync turned off.
I'm so glad that DF has finally done a deep analysis of this PC port, which is hardly talked about these days.
I remember playing this PC version of Gears on a Core 2 Quad and a Geforce 9600 GT before I decided to get an Xbox 360, and at full 1920x1080 on the highest settings, the framerate performance seems to be very similar to the Xbox 360 version, parts of the cutscenes that dipped in framerate on the 360 also dipped similarly on the 9600 GT. Other than the annoying GFWL, I think this port is kinda underrated and runs quite well on high-end machines at the time, unlike Crysis. (P.S. I also remember running this on a much older Pentium 4 and an ATI Radeon 9600 at a ridiculously low resolution of 320x240 as well, and it was a miracle that it could even run on that hardware!)
Games for Windows live is no longer an obstacle. A hack came out which allows you to play these games without an account. I play Dirt 2 and Bulletstorm with a GFWL account.
Really was the birth of HD gaming. Technically that was when gen 7 began so in 2005. But I think Gears was the ushering in of gaming as we know it today. The "HD" era. I'm speaking of consoles of course. PC was enjoying 16:10 HD resolutions back in 2003ish or so fairly commonly. But Gears set such a benchmark for xbox 360 and thus the entire 7th gen console era in terms of visual fidelity. And.... Gears is one of the most influential and greatest third person shooters ever made. So there's that also. It's also one of the best playing shooters ever made. Full package. Great looking game. Great playing. I still play Gears 1 to this day. I play the Ultimate Edition like once a year or so since it came out, and it still holds up and it's gameplay is still great.
Developers really need to go back to making those high detailed high-frequency textures even on older games like this, and the previous unreal engine titles, we got to see extremely high detail up close, and games are only 4.42 to 8GB big. They actually managed to add a lot more detail to the surfaces with a lot less VRAM, add lower resolution assets, and honestly the end result is better looking then a good chunk of what we see today with 40gb installs.
Well the remake of Resident Evil 2 is only 20something GB and yet looks better, AND IS better than most games that are 70-100gb. It's absurd. There needs to be WAY more installation options for games than there are. Exclude the languages I won't play it in. If I want to only play in regular HD resolutions and not ultra HD, I should be able to download lower quality assets that aren't so massive in size. Stuff like that.
*than
Whenever I forced v-sync in-game, I remember the framerate would shit itself. The V-Sync was likely left off because it really fucks the frame pacing all up.
+10 metal points to John knowing KSE was a band immediately and calling Alex out :D
Ah I had this exact build with the fastest DDR2 OCZ RAM, my Zotac AMP! 8800gt fans stopped working so I fitted it with an Accelero Twin Turbo II, good times.
The muted colour trend started before Xbox 360 and before Gears of War. I remember Black on PS2, that already did this. The reason is that the only thing you can do if you can't tonemap and can't do true HDR, that any kind of lighting operation ends up mixing your colour with grey and ends up muting it, so it looks weird going from highly saturated to unsaturated, so going for an undersaturated look from the get go makes it more cohesive as a whole.
Another reason is in texture compression. On Xbox and Gamecube you have S3TC, where per 4x4 block, you specify two arbitrary colours, and select each pixel by interpolating between these two colours. Naturally this means that whenever the image is largely monochrome alongside a given anyhow tinted palette, image compression will be visually imperceptible; otherwise, it will have colour fringing where two hues plus brightness variation occur in one block, or 3 different hues. A bit like the bad old ZX Spectrum attribute clash :D Naturally on the PS2 if you can stick to a monochrome palette per texture, you can get away with 4-bit palette textures a lot more frequently than otherwise.
In between standard dynamic range (aka low), and high dynamic range, there's a whole lot of EDR, extended dynamic range techniques. One is to reconfigure the output framebuffer from 8:8:8:8 ARGB into (2:)10:10:10, so basically apart from losing an otherwise generally used attribute output buffer (originally alpha) or reducing its precision a whole lot, there's really no drawback. Other is to use 8-bit output Alpha to carry the exponent or gain factor beyond the standard dynamic range. The problem was largely not about fitting into the EDRAM framebuffer on the XBOX360, although that too; it was about fitting into the limited VRAM bandwidth as a whole, and of course most of that is incurred by target framebuffer surface access, as it's not compressed unlike textures, and also has a Z-/stencil surface, so frame-buffer write bandwidth was a serious limitation on PC at the time. EDRAM in Xbox360 was an interesting hardware optimisation, with the intended framebuffer surface being faster than typical VRAM and the rest of VRAM being slower.
Consoles up until and including that generation usually had something ahead of off-the-shelf general purpose hardware, or specialised in some way that would allow you to achieve something that other affordable hardware couldn't. Xbox 360 took maybe a year until easily available PC hardware would surpass it. PS3's Cell however stayed unique in its throughput and flexibility for a longer time. The advantages of either system were however to a large extent negated by a big push for multi platform games.
I remember a tank mission from one of the Quake 3 engine Medal of Honor games that relied heavily on pre-animated level destruction. Far less detailed than in Gears, of course, but it was still fascinating to play around with.
I think that the pipes stick out so much from the background is because the wall behind them is probably a StaticMesh too, which only receives light information on its vertices but since it's flat they're spaced too far apart to create realistic shadows there. Either that, or the pipes were placed as a last-minute addition after the baked lighting was already rendered. Sunlight is hitting that scene so if everything went right, I think it would indeed look fine. The beauty of slightly fuzzy baked lightmaps at the time (and when I made maps on Unreal Engine 2) is that they naturally create "contact shadows", just like you saw with the car right afterwards. Just, only on BSP, which works with lightmaps, not where models contact other models. And of course, totally static. So it's not without drawbacks.
If you're continuing this trend, Halo 2 Vista must be next!
I just recently built a Q6600 Retro PC. I have a 9800 GT in there right now, but I bought an HD 4890, though it needs a new cooler, so one from Arctic is on the way. It'll be here on Tuesday. Very excited!!!!
Gears Of War was always way ahead of it's time. Not only did each iteration push graphics to the max (Especially Gears 2) but it also revolutionized 3rd person gameplay.
I played this game's multiplayer SO much on an overclocked AMD A64X2-5600+ & 3870 machine and it ran so well at 1440*900. This game really looked good back in '07.
Gears of war was so manly game i loved it to death!
This brings back memories. The first time seeing that chain saw cutting someone. Also I remember excitedly reading a preview in this game in a magazine. who remembers reading a magazine.
Enabling Triple Buffering through the GeForce Panel will smooth out the frame-rate. It wants to run at 62fps and enabling Triple Buffering knocks it down to the proper 60fps. I remember having to do that with many Unreal Engine 3 games on PC back then...
Also, what's cool about Gears of War 1 is that it's one of the few Unreal Engine 3 games that can actually run on Pixel Shader 2 GPUs. So anything from 2002's ATI 9500 to Nvidia's FX 5200 can run Gears of War.
Who remember for the first time, that Rain water flowing through the trees and ground, it was amazing !!!
No wonder it runs well; I played this game originally on an Athlon X2 4800+ and a 256MB GeForce 7300GT.
I loved this video.
Yeah that Pentium 4 would limit the game far more than a 6800 Ultra, even my E5300 at the time (while smooth) was being used 100% at around 60 fps and it's far better.
Workaround to changing the files is simple. Cut, paste to the desktop, change, backup, insert the changed file back.
High end? The Q6600 was literally the slowest quadcore CPU intel released that generation running at a measly 2.4ghz. The 8800GT was an ok card, but had half the memory bandwidth its higher end GTX and Ultra counterparts provided, so not exactly stellar.
I don't know anyone who bought a Q6600 to keep it at stock clocks.
This is a great video as always, though some of the stuttering that’s mentioned, as well as the visible frame tearing shown in this video, could be avoided with the right 3rd party tools. It was difficult to do that with AMD’s older default drivers, but D3D Overrider was a great free app that could properly force Triple Buffered V-Sync, which made Gears of War incredibly smooth and fluid on PC.
I went from a dual Voodoo 2 setup in the mid 90s, to ATI GPUs, which eventually became AMD. I’d built PCs for people with Nvidia cards, but my first Nvidia card was from the 10 series, outside of the severely locked down Nvidia cards featured in older MacBook Pros I owned for graphic design work. As a result, I was using a lot of different aftermarket tools for AMD GPUs. Aside from Riva-tuner’s D3D-Overrider, there was the incredible Radeon Pro, a program made by John Maturi, specifically for AMD cards. He was hired by AMD shortly after the 390x released, and unfortunately, AMD didn’t properly utilize his skill set to create a cleaner, more unified driver, the way John Maturi did with Radeon Pro.
At its best though, the Radeon Pro tool set was something I used all the time for games that had issues with AMD’s implementation of triple buffered V-Sync. It could cap the frame rate properly, and the included game hooks worked across every single game. For titles that had Nvidia specific features, if you had certain AMD GPUs, you could even use Radeon Pro’s vendor spoofing tool to use some of those exclusive settings. Radeon Pro also had a setting that helped with Unreal Engine 3 titles, where texture streaming pop up was initially common.
Wish you guys would have had some saves handy for several points in the game. Also, perhaps test some of this stuff out first =-P
PS - Windows 10 is not the issue, stop being lazy.
Really interesting to see what PC players were dealing with at the time. I got the game on release day on the 360 and was absolutely amazed by it, just hadn't seen anything like it at the time. When it came out most 360 games up to that point for me really just felt to me like higher resolution Xbox games. Played it by connecting my 360 to a 4:3 CRT PC monitor with a VGA cable so it letterboxed it to a fairly small window, but I was sat right up to the thing as it was in my room at Uni and it looked insane for the time.
Us console gamers had a good year or 2 of having a one up over PC players but that did not happen this gen. I wonder if it ever will again - probably not. These days you'll always be able to build something that'll run games better than a console (with the same feature set) even if it's just come out - as long as you have the cash.
Not long got a XboxOne X & got Gears Of War Ultimate, and got Gears of War 4 with four bonus games. Gears of War, GOW2, GOW3 & Judgment for £18.95, so I brought GOW5 20% off with Game Pass making it £39.99. So now i own the whole collection & now on GOW3 Act 3, also been playing Multiplayer on GOW5, 4 & 3. If your new to Gears Of War GOW5 Multiplayer is definitely more newcomer friendly, getting used to the shotgun in the older games is a must.
Back in 2007... when I first heard that gears of war coming to pc, I was entirely blown away...(I can not emphasize enough how hyped I was, really...)
But... when I first witnessed the stutters on pc release. It was a immediate deal breaker (for me) and I was so down and disappointed...
...
One of my friend kept playing it and he was telling me about headache he is getting due to the stuttering image and screen tearings...
My gaming laptop is above the recommend spec. And it does fairly well. Also I do think that Gears of War Ultimate Edition had fixed that.
Killertruth186 lol no, the ultimate edition for pc is a joke. It’s a broken mess
@@1969Angust I am guessing that it doesn't run well?
@@1969Angust On most PC systems?
Killertruth186 nope not at all, i have an i9900k with an 2080ti and it still runs like absolute garbage. Last time i tried i was glad if i got over 20fps in 1440p
Dear Digital Foundry Team, this is a real fps unlock!
1)In regards to enabling the console properly, first open your user WarInput.ini file, located at My Documents -> My Games -> Gears of War for Windows -> WarGame -> Config -> WarInput.ini .
With this open, find the section labeled [Engine.Console]. In this section, change the line ConsoleKey=Subtract to ConsoleKey=Tilde . Additionally, at the end of this section a line read bEnableUI = false . Change this line to bEnableUI = True . These changes will make tilde open the full console.
2)During the first cut scene use console by "~" button and type that command manually without brackets (set Engine.GameEngine bSmoothFrameRate FALSE)
Going back to now. I got a GTX 660 > 960 > 1060. Never had any complaints. When I felt I wasn't getting enough performance I'd upgrade to the newer card. First good graphics card I got was a GTX 295. I think it came with Counter Strike Condition Zero.
Beautiful game for its time, blew my mind back in 2006. And Mass Effect came out the next year and continued to show how amazing UE3 was.
The nvidia 8800 GT was the first real gpu that i ever bought when i was still just a little kid. Been a fan of pc gaming ever since.
I used to have an e4300 and 8800gts 320mb, good times lol, when cpu's were all unlocked and gpu's were evolving so fast we had new gens almost every 6 months from Ati and nvidia.
You guys need to play Resistance: Fall of Man because whenever someone talks about Gears that is the game I think of.
i've played this on a GeForce 5800 Ultra and Radeon X1950. What a difference lol.
I think the motion blur wasn't a post-effect here (like, in screen-space), but the textures were actually smeared along the model when it was moving, it was rendered in 3D already blurred. That's why the inside is blurry, but the silhouette is still sharp.
(edit: turns out I was wrong, more in my reply)
TheBurek ...no
@@WeeWeeJumbo I remember tech demos and DX samples from around that time demonstrating texture-space motion blur and DoF effects. I've done some digging, it's more difficult to find UE3 docs and samples now that UE4 is out for many years, but yeah, it appears that my assumption was wrong. It is using "modern" motion vectors and screen-space blurring, but it's rejecting samples that aren't close enough in velocity, such as static background, and that's why silhouettes appear sharp. It can blur outside the objects but with additional cost of blurring the velocity map itself, so it's off by default and off in the game itself. I stand corrected.
I just LOVE when you two fellow nerds are gushing about great achievements in gaming from the past!!! 8-D
I used to play the crap out of the first GoW in online co-op on a very similar yet somewhat more powerful hardware (QX6700 @3 GHz, 2x OCed 8800 GTX on a 27" 1920x1200 screen, Windows asta la Vista...) and it ran... not all that much differently than yours but was still very playable! Well, maybe except for the multiplayer but I didn't really enjoy it anyways (not because I sucked at it, I swear! xD)...
I just wish so much for GoW 2 & 3 to finally come out for PC because I don't own consoles but wanted to enjoy the rest of the trilogy at some point... :_(
God I remember bringing this game for my roomate's laptop, running it on a GeForce 8400M. And also the nights spending time in cybercafes playing co-op.
Unreal Engine has always run FANTASTIC at the time, it was so well optimized. I have videos on my channel running Batman Arkham Asylum and Gears on a laptop mobile ATI GPU and it ran above 30FPS. Unreal engine games ran great.
I had the 8800gtx and it was a great card.
I can confirm that the Vsync implementation is buggy on new drivers,
I ran this game on a 7300le and 8800GT back in the day and the Vsync actually worked as intended. in Dx10 implementation is bugged with newer drivers. forcing it solves it.
I love this kind of content, keep it up !!!
More more more !!! "DF Almost-Retro" ;)
8800 gt i remember back when i was 8th grade i was dreaming of that card. now i got RTX2060S what a strange life.