Gears of War 4 Xbox One X Enhanced - First Look from Digital Foundry

• About 175 watts power consumption.
• Native 4K with locked 30 fps.

? So much for XboneX being a high-end PC equivalent.

Framerate dips below 60fps at 1080p (to the 40s ouch), how embarrassing lol. I like how you failed to mention that in your summary Ron.

Titanfall 2 looks freaking awesome!

Also, even Halo 5 looks incredible at 1080p with the improved fidelity

X1X was designed for DF's resolution gate.

? Ok Ron but do you finally admit it's no match for the GTX 1070 or are you still flogging that dead horse?

You have to admit there's no way a GTX 1070 equipped PC will buckle to the 40s at 1080p.

Too bad for you, X1X has rivaled GTX 1070 on other games which the GTX 1060 would be insufficient. Remember, X1X doesn't have actual "GTX 1070".

FreeSync for HDMI with standard 60 hz limit already indicates some limits for X1X.

Running at 1080p 60 fps mode, X1X has 125 watts power consumption while 4K 30 fps mode has 175 watts, hence the CPU bottle-necks the GPU at 1080p, but Xbox One X was designed for DF's resolution gate against PS4.

If a gamer wants high frame rates at 1080p/1440p with 4K borderline GPU, that's the PC's argument and MS sells PCs for this argument. MS Store has plenty of GTX 1070/1080 based PCs.

why waste your time with his damage control, he's a cow cowering behind a PC.

Console vs Console, the XB1X rips the pro a new one, I'm pumped for Call of Duty WW2 in 4k now!

C'mon bro, this is just sad now. We have video evidence of XboneX dipping to the freaking 40s here and you're still pedaling this nonsense.

Just let it go dude, this is sad. X1X is powerful for a console but it's no GTX 1070. Hell it's not even a GTX 1060 according to the benchmarks...

? A GTX 1070 completely annihilates the XboneX at 1080p.

? Is that your new excuse everytime the XboneX gets completely destroyed?

But teh customized cpu that's so strong it can't really be called Jaguar anymore?

You call that an excuse LOL

I'm legit pumped, I'm so excited for next week, you're here triggered over my plastic box :D

I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing his bullshit.

Dat lemming denial lol.

In fairness I never see you mention any negatives regarding Sony products and they exist. So you're basically calling him a fanboy, but you're not a cow bro? Come on dude.

I love how Ronbot has selectively omitted mentioning the 1080p/60fps mode's piss poor frame rate from the OP..... Hahahahahaha....

Cherry picking at it's finest...

If this game was ported over to the PS4 pro it would be down to 20s lol

So most powerful console, but no super computer? Sounds about right.

The spin that will be in this thread will make me delightfully dizzy.

You know that the power advantage is almost over. lol

@FLOPPAGE_50: You gotta get used to cows going from console vs console (when the PS4 was more powerful) to console vs their PC's (because the PRO's not powerful enough) now lol

The goal posts are a shifting :)

Yeah I like to see Quakpony show me a $500 PC that can do better.

Another native 4k game on the mighty Xbox One X

So much for its lack of 4k games

Microsoft delivering on their 4k promise

Quakpony

Indeed, he conveniently avoided the shitty 1080p performance.

Looking at the responses in this thread I rustled some lem jimmies.

Look at all the butthurt lemming tears already collecting in the thread.

"True powah at 46fps in 1080p!!!"

"Bu...bu...bu....bu...but it's just like a GTX 1070 PeeC!!1" ???

? PS4 Pro doesn't need trash like Gears of Flops 4 when it already has masterpieces like HORIZON that shit all over it already. They should have dropped it to 900p to keep the framerate locked at 60fps. Your XboneX is having a heart attack trying to keep it at 60fps.

@cainetao11: Frankly, the only thing that makes Quad different is the absence of graphs. SW is fun and all but why some people choose to play the brainless fanboy character all the time is beyond my understanding.

@quadknight:

https://gearsofwar.com/en-gb/community/gears-4-xbox-one-x

Mike Rayner: The first and probably most noticeable improvement is, of course, that we render the game at native 4K resolution. Not only does that mean a 4x increase in our native rendering resolution compared to 1080p on Xbox One, but it also means much higher resolution textures across the board – from characters to environments, visual effects, everything! Bringing that incredible level fidelity to the console for the first time, which so far has really been limited to top-spec PC rigs, has been incredibly exciting for us.

Mike Rayner: Our team have set out to really push what we can achieve at a native 4K resolution while maintaining a rock solid framerate – and all in time for our Day One Update so fans can experience Gears of War 4 running with the power of Xbox One X on release day.

With that being our focus, we’re running at 4K 30FPS for Campaign/Horde and 4K 60FPS for Versus with adaptive scaling to ensure a rock-solid frame rate that fans expect from our head to head multiplayer. Many of the improvements to Campaign also make it to Versus and Horde, including 4K, HDR, higher resolution textures, improved draw distances, and Dolby Atmos Support.

...

We’ve worked on bringing a number of additional technical improvements that really bring our world to life more than ever before that are exclusive to Xbox One X. We have fully dynamic shadows now – so for example, if a tree is blowing in the wind, on the ground you’ll see that shadow of that tree dynamically move as you’d expect it to. We’ve also enhanced the detail in these shadows so they’ll look crisper and more detailed. The new Shadow improvements really add a lot to the feel of our environments.

One of the things you were probably gawping at (while you were busy dying, let’s not forget) in the Outsider Village are our real time light shafts – sometimes referred to as ‘God Rays’. You’ll now see shafts of sunlight or moonlight poking through statues, moving helicopter blades, the branches of trees and so on as they would in real life. It’s one of my personal favorite features because it’s just so visually eye catching and atmospheric.

We also have other features like improved reflections, longer draw distances and higher poly counts to further bump up the fidelity of our world.

RX-580 fails smooth 4K 30 fps X1X standard.

MSI RX-480 (6 TFLOPS) fails smooth 4K 30 fps X1X standard with high settings

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-gears-of-war-4-face-off for Xbox One baseline.

All settings retain the same level of edge coverage which can be modified instead by the temporal AA sharpening option. These settings have a minimal impact on performance and, as such, we recommend using the highest possible anti-aliasing quality with your own desired level of temporal sharpening. The differences are extremely subtle to the point where it's not clear where Xbox One falls but it does appear to at least match the high setting.

...

Character level of detail determines the complexity of characters within the scene. Modifying this setting impacts how many on-screen characters will be displayed at full detail. At the lowest setting, for instance, only the player character is displayed at full detail. That said, in practice, the difference is incredibly subtle as is the performance cost. The final setting in this group is foliage draw distance which controls, of course, how much visible foliage is presented on screen. Interestingly, Xbox One seems to use a custom value here with results closer to the high setting but still falling short in a few areas.

....

Lighting and shadows

The first half of this cluster focuses on lighting the game world with options such as light shaft quality, light scattering quality and bloom quality. Gears 4 sports both screen-space style light shafts and true volume lights. The quality of the light shafts, often referred to as crepuscular rays, are used at various junctions throughout the game and can be completely disabled if desired. Increasing this setting simply improves the depth and quality of the individual rays and, on Xbox One, we're looking at the high setting once again.

Then we have light scattering quality, which controls the volumetric lighting used in various portions of the game. Increasing this option improves the precision of the effect resulting in cleaner results without additional artefacting along its edges. Xbox One actually appears to use the medium option here, which still looks quite nice, but lacks some of the precision of the higher quality settings. Bloom and lens flare quality are two rather subtle options, then, that influence the intensity of said effects and both of these appear to operate at the high setting on Xbox One.

When it comes to shadows, Gears 4 leverages the strengths of Unreal Engine 4 in order to present very high quality shadow representation, even on Xbox One. The first setting focuses on the resolution of the shadow maps and the number of dynamic shadows used throughout the game and is pretty typical for a modern release. Impressively, the Xbox One version is actually a match for the ultra settings on PC which was an unexpected surprise but there is a reason for it, as we'll touch on shortly.

Capsule shadows are another nice feature and something that was introduced in Unreal Engine 4.11. Essentially, these act as indirect shadows which help root characters more firmly in the scene. The high and ultra settings produce the same quality of capsule shadows but the former limits the number of characters per scene using the higher quality effect. Xbox One appears to be a match for the high setting.

...

We believe that this technique has allowed the team to make use of higher quality shadow maps on Xbox One.

Lastly, we have the all-important ambient occlusion which is designed to handle contact shadows throughout the scene... Xbox One is interesting in that it doesn't appear to completely match any of these results on the PC with very subtle differences in coverage. We'd peg it somewhere between high and medium but it's not entirely clear.

Advanced visuals

Screen space reflections have become a common method for displaying scene accurate reflections with a reasonable performance cost by utilising screen space information. The downside is that, when relevant data is occluded from view, the reflections lose the detail as well. We see this same behavior up through the ultra setting as higher settings simply display more refined, complex reflections. After examining a number of different areas, Xbox One appears to fall around the medium quality for this setting.

Real-time cinematics and advanced settings

There are just two options in this category - depth of field and sub-surface scattering. Depth of field controls the quality of the associated effect and is used exclusively in real-time cut-scenes. Xbox One appears to fall around the high setting

Sub-surface scattering, then, simply determines the quality of light playing off of skin and other fleshy materials. Xbox One appears to utilise the high setting here and the results do look excellent during the real-time cutscenes...

Xbox One X has the following improvments

1. textures,

2. shadows, XBO already has near-ultra settings.

3. light shafts, XBO already has high settings.

4. reflections, XBO already has medium settings.

5. longer draw distance, XBO already has high settings.

6. higher poly, XBO already has high settings.

Because it is fun. I play it up plenty. Yes there is some truth to it in my case, MS did in fact pay for consoles and TVs in rec rooms on Army posts and I benefitted from them. They also do many things for veterans like game codes for vets which gives free games to veterans. Being a disabled vet I appreciate a US based company doing right by US veterans.

I also like being social in gaming. I agree PS is the better SP games console but by that measure the Xbox is a better MP console for my money. Aside from Alienation and a couple of times playing U4 MP there is jack and crap to play on PSN. Halo 5, Gears 4, I've been in Sea of Thieves since Feb and look forward to it next year. But I do enjoy my PS4 Pro and playing games on it. Last year my GOTY was Alienation and this year a front runner is Nioh. Its all in fun.

X1X was designed for DF's XBO resolution gate i.e. X1X's cost structure is bias towards 4K resolution. hahahahahahahahahahaha

That makes no sense, if the cpu is the limiting factor why would they drop it down to 900p to increase fps, the lower the resolution the more the cpu is stressed. 1x could probably hold a solid 60fps at 1440p though.

Wait isn't Horizon Zero Dawn like 1800p checkerboard on the pro or something like that?

SW has been struck with mad cow disease and it gets worse the closer we get to the 1X release. Seems like you guys would find solace in all the AAA exclusives you love to brag about.

@ronvalencia Why are you showing RX 580 benchmarks? @quadknight talked about a 1070 and we can dig up your posts about the X1X's GPU being on par with a GTX 1070.

GTFO with you salty tears damage control....... if 1080p mode ran a rock solid 60fps you soon would of bought that shit up and rubbed it in peoples faces and you know it.

Damage control central here now......hahahaha......

It is indeed but it still has shaders, lighting, textures and graphics beyond anything available to buy on X....

Dear Ron, leave DF vids to Zero_epyon. He does a hell of a job posting the pros/cons but you, you are NOT equip for posting DF at all!

Unholy haters Captain RonMan, you got'em crying like lil girls...

Lololololol The Salt is glorious... Such good stuff and the MonsterBox MasterRace is still dayzzz from launching. Mangy, it's good to be King baby!!!! :P

Judging by Ronbots replies he's the salty one :p ;)

@SecretPolice said:

Unholy haters Captain RonMan, you got'em crying like lil girls...

Lololololol The Salt is glorious... Such good stuff and the MonsterBox MasterRace is still dayzzz from launching. Mangy, it's good to be King baby!!!! :P

Seeing how its framerate problems manifest in 1080p, I'm guessing this may be more of a CPU than a GPU issue.

Embarrassing Ron strikes again.

1080p/sub 60 fps, what a joke.

And it's mostly praise, looks fantastic. High res textures benefitting from the extra RAM. Only 1 single area in the campaign in the performance mode goes in the 40's fps, but he even says later how he was expecting the framerate to buckle in the boss of area 4 where it is very intensive graphically, and it sounds like he was very impressed how the game stayed at a perfect 60 fps during that part.

But...but...teh highly modified Jaguar CPU...... Lmao..... He'll never learn.

@xantufrog: Probably. 4K/30fps is more demanding to the GPU than 1080p/60fps is so it's likely a CPU bottleneck. Which leads back to what we've been saying all along. X1X CPU is still a POS.

Wow beat me to it. Some one's very eager. Seriously only 2 bullet points?

Lets see the same posters come in here and complain about how much was omitted from the video because of bias.

I don't expect them to...

@quadknight said:

@ronvalencia said:

@quadknight said:

@ronvalencia said:

@quadknight said:

? So much for XboneX being a high-end PC equivalent. Framerate dips below 60fps at 1080p, how embarrassing lol. I like how you failed to mention that in your summary Ron.

X1X was designed for DF's resolution gate.

? Ok Ron but do you finally admit it's no match for the GTX 1070 or are you still flogging that dead horse?

You have to admit there's no way a GTX 1070 equipped PC will buckle to the 40s at 1080p.

Too bad for you, X1X has rivaled GTX 1070 on other games which the GTX 1060 would be insufficient. Remember, X1X doesn't have actual "GTX 1070".

FreeSync for HDMI with standard 60 hz limit already indicates some limits for X1X.

Running at 1080p 60 fps mode, X1X has 125 watts power consumption while 4K 30 fps mode has 175 watts, hence the CPU bottle-necks the GPU at 1080p, but Xbox One X was designed for DF's resolution gate against PS4.

C'mon bro, this is just sad now. We have video evidence of XboneX dipping to the freaking 40s here and you're still pedaling this nonsense.

Just let it go dude, this is sad. X1X is powerful for a console but it's no GTX 1070. Hell it's not even a GTX 1060 according to the benchmarks...

? A GTX 1070 completely annihilates the XboneX at 1080p.

@FLOPPAGE_50 said:

why waste your time with his damage control, he's a cow cowering behind a PC.

Console vs Console, the XB1X rips the pro a new one, I'm pumped for Call of Duty WW2 in 4k now!

? Is that your new excuse everytime the XboneX gets completely destroyed?

These comparisons only count when the X1X is close to performance of the 1070. A GTX 970 on Ultra 1080p beats the Xbox One.

He's an expert shill. He's trying to control the message. Remember when I was accused of leaving things out and twisting things around in my threads. Two bullet points, those same people are no where to be found.

The Xbox One X is so powerful that it cannot be compared to consoles but high end PCs behold the power. :P

A GTX 970 does this game at ultra 1080p/60. Doesn't require a supercomputer.

Bu, bu but this, bu, bu, but that..... Glorious, keep it comin. :P

How does a GTX 970 perform at 4k?

So add another native 4K game to the list

But cant do 4k at 30fps.

@Pedro: @tdkmillsy: obviously it can't do 4k because the 970 only has 3.5 GB to work with. Having an 8gb graphics card is still nowhere near having a supercomputer.

This is also another reason why I stress that it should be mentioned which CPU is used for these benchmarks. That jaguar CPU on these consoles suck.