Okay, I get the concern. After the multiple botched launches on the Windows Store regarding UWP titles, including the Gears of War Ultimate Edition, you have every reason to be concerned about the launch of Gears of War 4. Thankfully, this timethey pulled it off. Gears of War 4 is running in full DX12 glory, featuring implementations such asexcellent multi threading, tiled resources, and even that magical Asynchronous Compute functionality! For those wanting to dig in an really see what all is going on with the settings the guys over at NVIDIA did a full breakdown of each setting and even the impact of those settings when used with a GeForce graphics card.

Thankfully for our testing as well as yours at home, if you care to join in with your results in the comments, The Coalition has included an excellent built in benchmarking utility. After playing about 5-6 hours of the campaignwith various cards I found the built in benchmarking utility to be very consistent with real world gaming scenarios within GoW4 so we felt confident in relying on the numbers it gave us so that we could deliver as many results and conduct as many tests as possible.

I have to applaud The Coalition for avoiding the 'absolute minimum' FPS trap. The reason I say this is because the absolute minimum could be a wild outlying frame that you may not even notice. It's the amount of time that the FPS stays around those low that become important. In most of our testing we strive to show the 1% and .1% lows, but The Coalition does a great job with at least providing the 5% lows which is fairly representative of what you'll see when gaming.

Testing was all completed on the standard test system that we used where we completed three runs with each graphics card and took the average of the Average frame rates as well as the 5% minimums. All of the tests were run at the standard 'Ultra' setting and making sure to disable the game's built in dynamic resolution scaling to ensure that the game was running at its true resolution. Another thing of interest is that if the card supported it and the option was present Async Compute was used for all of these tests. Unfortunately, this option was missing for all of our Maxwell cards, but did show and was functional with our GTX 1060. Settings that were used can be found below.

X99 Test System