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Gears of War fail to turn
GEARS OF WAR is out today for PC owners State-side, and is due to hit British shelves on Friday. Where there's a new DirectX 10 game there are, inevitably, benchmarks - and the Unreal Engine-based shooter doesn't disappoint.
The game actually came out on the Xbox 360 this time last year, so the PC conversion has taken fully 12 months. Those who haven't played the 360 version yet may find that the extra 5 short missions aren't much compensation. Neither is the fact that, to play the game at anything approaching the visual fidelity of the Xbox 360, one must spend at least as much on a graphics card as on Microsoft's next-gen console.
And the Xbox legacy doesn't end there. Thanks to the fact that the Vole's hardware has anti-aliasing handled in hardware, there's no anti-aliasing mode at all in DirectX 9 gameplay - you need to be running Vista and DX10 to manage that. And when you add on the extra overhead of running Microsoft's latest and 'greatest' operating system, you're talking about a serious piece of PC kit just to run a year-old 360 game.
Kyle has the lowdown and, as we expect, the latest Radeon card takes a trouncing, the GTX conquers all before it and the GT establishes itself as a great performance-mainstream card. We've heard it all before.
However, at least with Crysis PC gamers get to have the satisfaction of a brand new, bleeding edge game. With Gears of War, the whole endeavour appears to be a little too little too late. µ
Tags: Microsoft
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Yeah We did and it performed absolutely crap. The exact card you talk about.

Only ran on low-some medium settings, it looked okay if you aren't really that bothered about graphics, played okay overall for the 2900XT price tag its a pile of crap.

But then again, ATI.... I say no more than every ATI owner I known has suffered poor perfomance or fried cards for no reason.
There's quite some confusion over AA on the Unreal 3 engine. I can't enable it on UT3, other people say they can with DX10 and others say they can on DX9 with third party hacks (which I can't remember the names).

Why can't they just let the customer decide?

1 unreal engine 3 dsnt even support antialiasing under dx9. 

2 gears of war dsnt have AA on the xbox 360. this is a FACT

3 my 8600gt ($110) runs this game maxed at 720P. this videocard dsnt cost $400. and also it dsnt RROD.



That must mean moronic enemy placement, same every time. That has to mean artificial action triggers, such as invisible tripwires.
And a very basic saving system, not to mention limited control.
I haven't played it, obviously, but I did play Unreal Tournament 3 (even bought the stupid thing) and I must say anything that comes from a console environment I avoid.
Compared to Crysis, the gameplay is stupid. Heck, compared to Half Life 1 the gameplay is stupid.
On a PC that is.
But I must express my surprise at all the hoopla around the so-called anti-aliasing issue. Storm in a teacup as far as I can see, since the drivers should be able to force a given level regardless of game settings.
If a game cannot set a level of AA, fine, but AA happens in the card, not in the game, and the card does not need the game to employ it.
More importantly, the game cannot prevent AA from happening if the drivers are set for it.
Unless, of course, Microsoft has found a way to actually turn off AA for GoW, which would be despicably underhanded, but not all that astonishing (from them, that is).
Well, considering that there is absolutely NO image quality difference in this game between DX10 and DX9, can somebody please try to explain to me whay DX10 has to be up to 50% slower then DX9?

The difference here was between 45FPS to 25 FPS.. playable an unplayable.. for no advantage whatsoever.... 

Didn't someone say that DX10 would be faster.. i mean wasn't that the whole (at least stated) reason why it wasn't backwards compatible? i mean as long as you can pretend that the Image quality is better you can blame worse performance on that... but not with all things being exactly the same!

Does everything that comes with Vista just have to totally SUCK.. i mean WTF did they DO to screw THAT up?!
"1 unreal engine 3 dsnt even support antialiasing under dx9."

Funny then that when Bioshock came out you could rename it to oblivion.exe to get AA in dx9. This was later fixed in drivers so you got AA without renaming. Then when the UT3 demo came out with no AA you could rename it to bioshock.exe to get AA in DX9. Who want to bet that renaming gow.exe to UT3.exe will give you AA in DX9? And that just like the other games this will be fixed in drivers or by third parties like Rivatuner or/and nhancer. Maybe they finally got it locked in GOW and AA cant be enabled but that does in no way mean it cant be done. It just means Microsoft paid for it not to be done.
I agree with you on that. Vista and the whole "games for windows" is a total JOKE. Vista sucks the life out of any descent hardware, and DX10 for gaming, WTH??? I have a Dell E1705 notebook with an Nvidia 7900GS vid card & 2gb ram. Hell if I am going to upgrade my machine anytime soon from the looks of things. I can play Crysis @ 1024 with all medium detail and I'm sure Gears would play @ a higher res in DX9 mode. Microsoft is screwing us inside and out with Vista and anything that has to do with it. XP FTW!!!
the game is not a console to pc conversion, it was originally developed for the PC, long before the xbox 360 version was even a twinkling in its daddys eye!
Ok fair enough the Radeon card they used takes a trouncing - would anyone care to try and compare the 1GB version of the 2900XT before simply proclaiming "ATI suck, green team all the way". If you want to compare the top of the range nVidia card (GTX) then you might as well compare it with the top of the range ATI card (unless you want to give nVidia free and biased publicity).
I cannot help but think(I read the article on Gears of War) that the whole, you cannot have AA in dx9, is entirely artificial.
As the game is obviously a dx9 game(the testers found zero differences between dx9 and dx10 code path), orginally designed to run on the dx9+ xbox360. And why would it take a year to port a game from dx9 to, well, dx9?

This whole thing smells like rotten fish.