Today's when Gears of War: Ultimate Edition will beexclusively released on the Windows 10 Store. A featthat was poised to bring ahallmark title of Microsoft Game Studiosback to its original home on the PC. It was meant to be doneit in style, to bring backa beloved series of which many gamers have warm memories and reintroduce it via the company's latest and ever popular low level APIDirectX 12.

Photoshowing Gears of War : Ultimate visual corruption - Taken by our Hardware Editor Keith May

Sadly what we ended up withis"one of the most disastrous PC game launches in years" writesForbes's Jason Evangelho. He continued to adviseAMD Radeon users to hold onto their dollars and wait this one out until at least some of the more major issues are addressed by the developers.

WhyGears of War: Ultimate Edition Is Ultimately Broken

The visual corruption you see above is only one of many of the game's problems. In fact the game has some of the worst performance issues that we've almost ever seen out of a triple A title. Let's first mentionsome of the issues that our friend Jason over at Forbes has run into and that we've also experiencedourselves at the lab while testingthis, there's no other word for it, unfinished game.

First of all the game is an absolute stuttering mess that's almost mistakable for a powerpoint slide show on several excellent high performance AMD Radeon cards for which running this game should otherwise be an absolute breeze. In fact the game is so broken that an AMD Radeon R7 370performs better than an R9 380. Agraphics cardthat features a much more powerful GPU and is typically 70% faster.

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Screenshots showing Gears of War : Ultimate visual corruption- Taken by our Hardware Editor Keith May

This seemed completely wrong and so we repeated the test several times to make sure we're not simply running into an anomaly.Surely enough we got the same result every single time and every other tech writer we've spoken to who has tested these two cards reported the same. This immediately raiseda red flag for us andleft us at sea. A Microsoft product thatwassupposed to be ashining beacon of what's demonstrably possible on the leading edge of technology, a showcase for the company's DirectX 12 API.

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[UPDATE203/01/201611:29:12 PM]

Our own Keith May breaks it down, the state of Gears Of War : Ultimate Edition andhow you can fix that nasty visual corruption bug.

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AMD Radeon R9 290X Is Outperforming The Faster R9 Fury And R9 Nano By A Factor Of 2 To 1 - What Exactly IsGoing On?

The issues didn't stop there either. The game is an absolute stuttering mess on the AMD Radeon R9 Nano, a $500 graphics card rated at 8 TFLOPs of compute and features cutting edge stacked High Bandwidth Memory technology. The Nano performed worse than the R9 290X in our labs, significantly worse.

The R9 Nano is a much more powerful card than the R9 290X mind - 8 TFLOPS vs 5.6 TFLOPS - you and there's really no good reason whatsoever as toto why itperformed the way it did.

Jason Evangelho went the extra mile and recorded gameplay of the R9 Nano and R9 Fury cards, both of which are high-end $500 game munching machines. To demonstrate just to what extent these performance issuesare prevalent and detrimental.

Jason Evangelho, Forbes

What you’re watching is the Radeon Fury running the Gears of War: Ultimate Edition benchmark on my capable Intel test bench, at 1440p with High quality settings. These settings include FXAA and Ambient Occlusion. You’re also seeing horrendous hitching and stuttering, and some visual corruption thrown in for good measure, making the game completely unplayable on an excellent $500 graphics card.

It's not a matter of simply not performing up to the usual par either, the gamesimply behaves like an unfinished product on this card and several others. As if the developers didn'teven bother to test the game on different popular hardware configurations for quality assurance as one would expect which really boggles the mind. For theultimate DirectX 12evangilist, it was not only unexpected of Microsoft but certainly unacceptable that such a product made its way out the door.

Jason Evangelho, Forbes

Another $500 graphics card exhibiting what amounts to a slideshow, rendered useless by a game that originally released nineyears agounderDirectX 9 on a console. This, folks, is not how Microsoft will win back PC gamers.

The Radeon 390x is just fine, achievingdouble the framerate at High Quality/4K as the more expensive Fury and Nano cards.

What on earth is happening? I can only speculate at this point, butMicrosoft PR finally sent me a statement late last night confirming the issue, although not with any level of detail: “We are working closely with AMD to address a few issues that users of some AMD Radeon Hardware are experiencing while playing Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 and expect that they will be addressed quickly in an upcoming update.”

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[UPDATED2016-03-01 - 9:44:52 PM]

We've received reports of stuttering and hitchingissues on Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 TI graphics cards as well.

Nvidia has also just launched Game Ready drivers with specific optimizations and fixes for Gears of War : Ultimate Edition which you can findover here.

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A List Of Issues That Should've Not Made It Out Of Beta

We've complied some of the notable issues that we've run into and they include :

- No multi-GPU support, SLI or Crossfire.

- R9 290x outperforms R9Nano.

- R9 Nano and R9 380 experience terrible artifacting at high settings.

- R9 Nano unplayable at 1440p and 4k due to stuttering/stalling.

- Nvidia GSync supportis broken.

- Frame Rate is not Uncapped, when "Unlocked" it will not exceed your monitor's refresh rate

- Game doesn't support exclusive full screen mode.

It's not yet clear what exactly isthe culprit behind these bizarre performance crippling issues and visual glitches. But it's looking more and more like we've got anotherBatman: Arkham Knight or Assassin's Creed Unity on our hands.

I think it's worth mentioning that Gears of War : Ultimate Edition , bizarrely,supports async compute.A performance boosting DirectX 12 feature that Ashes of the Singularity also supportsand AMD excels at. A feature that allowed the AMD Radeon graphics cardsto establish asignificant performance advantage over theirNvidia GeForce rivals in that title. All of which adds more to the mystery. At this point we can only wish that the developerscan quickly remedy the situation and leave no room for unhealthy speculation and conspiracy theorizing.

We'll keep a close watch on the state of Gears of War : Ultimate andupdate everyone accordingly. In the meantime we'd advise PC gamers to play a bit of a wait and see game before pulling the trigger. For those of you who have already pulled the trigger, you should take a look at the known list of game issues and their suggestedsolutions below.

Director of Community for Gears of War at The Coalition

Below is a listing of known Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 issues that we are tracking. We recommend consulting our Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Windows 10 help pages for additional answers to some frequently asked questions (https://gearsofwar.com/games/ultimate-edition/pc/help)

Download Issues

After purchasing the game from the Windows Store, users may experience downloads not progressing and the progress bar may be slow to move. The game is downloading at the standard rate and will be completed shortly. Pausing and resuming your download may also incorrectly display the wrong progress values during your download. Do NOT restart your download as this will only delay the process.

AMD Performance

AMD is an important partner bringing the promise of DirectX 12 to life for gamers everywhere. We are working closely with them to address a few issues encountered in Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 on AMD cards using GCN 1.1/GCN 1.2, and expect they will be addressed quickly in an upcoming update. Please visit AMD support pages for the latest on AMD drivers and software.

Intel display adapters on laptops

You may encounter the following message (after pressing Start/Enter at the title screen) when running Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 on a laptop:

"Your graphics hardware is not optimized for this game. You may experience degraded visual quality. Please visit https://gearsofwar.com/ for more information"

You will need to select your laptop’s High-Performance NVIDIA processor prior to playing Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 to resolve this issue.

Steps:

- Close the Game

- Open the NVIDIA Control Panel

- Select Manage 3D Settings

- Select High-Performance NVIDIA processor in the ‘Preferred graphics processor’ menu

- Select Apply

For laptops with AMD graphic cards, please visit: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/LaptopsFAQ.aspx

G-Sync™ Enabled Monitors

G-Sync™ is not supported by Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10. Running the Game with G-Sync™ enabled will cause significant performance issues. If you are using a G-Sync™ enabled monitor, you should disable it from the NVIDIA Control Panel. Alternatively, you can set Lock Framerate to OFF in the Video settings. The issue is being investigated together with our partners at NVIDIA and a driver update will be available in the future to address this. Please visit NVIDIA support pages for the latest on NVIDIA drivers and software.

AMD and Ambient Occlusion setting

There are visual issues with AMD graphics cards and the Ambient Occlusion setting, it is strongly recommended to turn this setting OFF. We are readying a fix to be deployed in the coming days.

To turn OFF Ambient Occlusion:

- Launch Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10

- From the Main Menu, go to Settings

- Select Video and set Ambient Occlusion to OFF