Gears of War 4 on Windows 10 will support unlocked frame rates and 4K textures

Mike Rayner, the technical director at Gears of War studio The Coalition, says its goal for the Windows 10 release of Gears of War 4 is “to deliver a highly optimized, customizable experience.” He told Eurogamer that means support for unlocked frame rates, ultra-wide monitors, and texture resolutions up to 4K.

“Support for v-sync tearing has recently come to UWP [the maligned Universal Windows Platform] and we will be able to offer proper unlocked frame rate support that gamers expect on day one,” Rayner said. “With Unreal Engine 4 and our own custom modifications, we can take much better advantage of multiple CPU cores, alleviating the game from being CPU-bound and allowing more room for the GPU to shine with enhanced visual quality or higher frame rates. Single-player will not be locked to 30 fps on PC." Multiplayer will be locked to 60 fps, however, presumably as a requirement of its “Play Anywhere” Xbox One cross-platform support.

The PC release of Gears 4 will also include a benchmark mode, support fully-remappable mouse and keyboard inputs, and offer a much greater range of video settings than its console equivalent. “Today we sit at 28 different settings and we're thinking of ways to add more for people to really have full control," he said. There will also be support for super-sampling, in conjunction with the dynamic scaling system The Coalition created for the Xbox One.

“You can super-sample, let's say up to 4K, and then enable dynamic scaling and set the maximum amount of scaling you want to allow so you can maintain a very crisp image with scaling kicking in where needed and only to the amount you consider acceptable,” Rayner explained.

Gears of War 4 is set to come out on October 11. Lay your eyes on a couple of gameplay videos here.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.