Gears Of War Ultimate Edition System Requirements May Make You Chainsaw Your Rig

Written by Jon Sutton on Wed, Feb 24, 2016 10:33 AM
System Requirements Optimum 1080p PC Build Low vs Ultra Screenshots GPU Performance Chart CPU List That Meet System Requirements GPU List That Meet System Requirements

For a second there I thought Microsoft had forgotten all about us. Originally announced for PC and Xbox One way back at E3 last year, the Xbox One version of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition came any went last August and there hasn't been a sniff of the PC port. Well it looks as if it's coming soon, because the system requirements for Gears of War: Ultimate Edition briefly went up on the Windows Store before being snatched down. 

We've got them listed below and they might not make for pleasant reading for some of you. It seems to be a feature of DirectX 12-compatible games that they have mammoth system requirements, which wasn't exactly how we were sold the new graphics API. That extra hardware does net you the best version of Epic's third-person shooter yet though. Gears of War: Ultimate Edition comes with remastered 4K visuals and an uncapped frame rate, should your gaming PC be up to the task.

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Minimum System Requirements

  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-2400S 2.5 GHz or AMD FX-6300 Six-Core 3.5 GHz
  • RAM: 8 GB System Memory
  • GPU: GeForce GT 650 Ti or Radeon R7 260X
  • HDD: 60 GB Available Space
  • DX: DirectX 12

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Recommended System Requirements

  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5 GHz or AMD FX-8350 4.0 GHz
  • RAM: 16 GB System Memory
  • GPU RAM: 4 GB Video Memory
  • GPU: GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290X
  • HDD: 60 GB Available Space
  • DX: DirectX 12

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Ultra 4K System Requirements

  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-4790T 2.7 GHz or AMD FX-8350 4.0 GHz
  • RAM: 16 GB System Memory
  • GPU RAM: 6 GB Video Memory
  • GPU: GeForce GTX 980 Ti or Radeon R9 390X
  • HDD: 60 GB Available Space & installed on SSD
  • DX: DirectX 12

Okay, so Quantum Break was one thing; I mean, it's a port of a brand new Xbox One game, but this is something else entirely. Gears of War: Ultimate Edition is a remaster of a decade-old game, so we were a little bit surprised to see such sky-high recommended system requirements. While both the GTX 970 and R9 290 are popular graphics cards, they're both certainly towards the higher end of the scale. For 1080p gaming in a Gears of War remaster we'd have expected them to be massively surplus to requirements. Likewise with the 16GB RAM. We haven't seen many games push at 8GB rig just yet, and we'd be surprised if Gears of War: Ultimate Edition does, in truth.

Once again we also see Windows 10 64-bit as the minimum operating system, and we expect this to be the standard for first-party Microsoft titles going forward. It means we can advantage of all those juicy DirectX 12 features, but it does also mean forcing us to used the dreaded Windows Store. Don't expect to see Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on Steam any time soon. 

Down at the minimum and things are a little bit more reasonable. While Microsoft hasn't specified, expect these to be good for minimum settings at 1080p, or higher settings at 720p. 

Obviously gaming at 4K is a different matter, and you're going to need a truly monstrous rig to crank Gears of War: Ultimate Edition up to that ultra-sharp resolution. No complains there; a premium experience demands a premium rig. For those of us with a GTX 980 Ti or equivalent, at least we can come back and enjoy Gears of War at 4K at a later date. One thing to highlight is Microsoft recommending an SSD. This should cut back on load times significantly, particularly when making use of 4K textures, and like in Batman: Arkham Knight could reduce instances of stuttering. 

Remember, you can always check out how well your PC can run the Gears of War: Ultimate Edition System Requirements here, where you can check benchmarking and performance from other users. Compare your graphics card to the Gears of War: Ultimate Edition benchmark chart.

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07:14 Mar-18-2016

Could I run this 60fps 1440p with a single 980 Ti?

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19:22 Mar-08-2016

Sugar honey ice tea.....
Fandom umbrella cat kitchen you Microsoft....

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16:16 Mar-02-2016

dem textures, gears has always had high res textures and more vram available in the xbone meant they cranked em.

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07:11 Mar-03-2016

How does an Xbox run a dx12 game though? The game runs on windows 10 only, so im not sure whats going to happen console side

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09:40 Mar-03-2016

It has windows 10 (Kind of)

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08:40 Mar-02-2016

Horrible optimisation.... Microsoft, This ain't gonna boost PC gaming :P

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13:33 Feb-29-2016

ugh no high or ultra D;

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16:20 Feb-29-2016

Snap, but lets wait and see, specs are being put out too high all the time....here's hoping....

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04:24 Feb-29-2016

hi can I run this?

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06:09 Feb-29-2016

should be able to, yeah. depending on optimization

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06:37 Feb-29-2016

any idea on settings?

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15:39 Feb-29-2016

I have no idea, as I don't know what setting options will be available. Probably low-medium like me, maybe a bit higher, again, depending on optimization. If this is a shoddy PC port the options will be very limited, and if it's badly optimized, it won't happen. if it has decent optimization you should be able to low-medium, maybe higher, as I said.

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06:37 Feb-27-2016

Hmm...

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23:27 Feb-25-2016

This is bull****! 16 GB of RAM and gtx 970 ahahahhahahhah

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10:42 Feb-28-2016

bull indeed, the game doesnt even look that good, we all tought it was a gears of war1 remaster....what on earth will we execpt for gears of war 4 then?

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21:37 Feb-28-2016

here's the problem with your argument. Gears 4 will be built from teh ground up with XB1 (and possibly PC), in mind, with much better graphics, with newer tech. for the time, the gears games were gorgeous, well, as far as a gritty shooter anyway. by today's standards they suck, but for the time they were exceptional graphically.

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11:35 Feb-25-2016

A gtx 970 is recommended? I'm wondering here, did they actually add anything to justify the huge leap in system requirement or is this just more headroom for them to skimp on optimization? I get the feeling its the latter.

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09:12 Feb-25-2016

All hope is lost when consumers/gamers read at those "specs farce" and seem its ok and how many fps will they get.

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08:59 Feb-25-2016

settings for me? and fps?

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07:01 Feb-29-2016

With that resolution you should get high/tweaked ultra with decent fps, however at this time fps cannot be said

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07:04 Feb-25-2016

those minimum specs are perfect thx!!

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21:24 Feb-25-2016

haha you and me bro ^^ (i actually had an 250X but i will get the 750 TI next week)

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03:01 Feb-25-2016

980 Ti or 390x??
260x or 650 Ti


I am really interested to atleast know what difference a DX 12 makes in a game it is implemented properly...

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05:45 Feb-25-2016

You're not the only one. I've only heard tidbits, but I think games on DX12 are supposed to run a hell of a lot smoother, probably due to some kind of optimization. It's kind of uncanny I think, Windows 10 has been out for half a year now with DX12 riding on top and all there is is that one benchmark... I'd have expected to see something with DX12 by now.

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13:24 Feb-25-2016

look around at the comments of people mad that there is already games that require dx12. kind of funny actually.

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02:53 Feb-26-2016

It's not because of dx12... it's because the only os that supports Dx12 is windows 10. And many people do not like windows 10.

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09:44 Feb-26-2016

As of what I have heard, Dx 12 need windows 10 to work. It couldn't work on older windows unless microsoft bring a pretty big update. And no company would not want its users to stick to older version of its OS :P

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07:59 Feb-26-2016

You'll find complainers everywhere. Even you are. It may now be now but some day it'll be.

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05:57 Feb-29-2016

Are there games that use DX12 by now? I'm on Win10 so maybe I didn't notice...

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06:22 Feb-29-2016

Nope

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00:45 Feb-25-2016

I don't know man so far on here and here and here says a little different on what you mentioned for ultra 4k and minimum also it is not mentioned which processor.

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00:48 Feb-25-2016

is to be used cause for the minimum it is a core i5 at 2.7 GHz which it could be a 1st gen i5 instead of a 2nd gen.

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22:57 Feb-24-2016

are the 4k requirements targeted at 60 fps?

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00:45 Feb-25-2016

They better be :P

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08:40 Feb-25-2016

no. 30 fps lock on that res. Dont take this seriously...

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22:53 Feb-24-2016

4k resolution 60 fps

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22:22 Feb-24-2016

I'm still a bit unsure whether I want to go through the first Gears again. Just unsure whether they have added enough for another playthrough.

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20:49 Feb-24-2016

weird that 4k requirements have "GeForce GTX 980 Ti or Radeon R9 390X" when it should be GeForce GTX 980 Ti or Radeon R9 Fury X or something like that. This is coming from a R9 390X user just saying a bit weird

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22:34 Feb-24-2016

Actually this is with DX12, the 390X and the 980Ti have the same performance roughly

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22:36 Feb-24-2016

that would be cool if true, awesome

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22:58 Feb-24-2016
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23:26 Feb-24-2016

I read it , its around 10 fps difference with a 390 not x so could be possible for 390x to catch up since its a slightly more OC card

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04:12 Feb-27-2016

more than just speed, it has more shaders. the combination of more shaders and higher speed is what gives it the high end strength it has.

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22:45 Feb-24-2016

GD says a gtx 980 is 13 percent faster than a 390x , probably the 4 gigs frame buffer of 980 is limiting in 4k performance T_T damn, nvidia should have released an 8 gig version of the 970 and 980

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23:27 Feb-24-2016

I have a cousin with a 980 and we get similar and at times for me better performance than him, I do believe it could be something related to his vram but before crimson drivers I was getting lower fps than him by 10-20 then after when crimson drivers were released my performance increased greatly

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06:41 Feb-25-2016

With DX12 being based from the AMD Mantle technology the AMD GPU's have more support when it comes to DX12 due to something in their hardware and so the game runs better than on the Nvidia cards, however Nvidia is still dominating the DX11 with performance. There was an article about it here somewhere on GD.

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09:31 Feb-25-2016

I don't think any of this is confirmed. On dx11 performance varies while on dx12 we will have to wait and see. There are only indications so far.

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20:43 Feb-24-2016

Recommended and 4K requirements seem about right. I do however question why the game needs 16gigs of RAM to run under the recommended. 16gigs @ 1080p doesn't seem right.

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20:30 Feb-24-2016

Haha! I'll max this with eas... 16GB'S? 16 F'ing GB's!? Didn't these games originally run on XBOX360's?

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Can They Run... |

| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz GeForce GTX 1060 Gigabyte Mini ITX OC 6GB 32GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core 3.6GHz Radeon RX 5700 PowerColor Red Dragon 8GB 16GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
0% No [1 votes]
| 60FPS, Ultra, 4k
Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Asus ROG Strix OC 11GB 32GB
| 30FPS, Ultra, 1440p
Ryzen 5 2600X 6-Core 3.6GHz GeForce GTX 1080 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
| 60FPS, Ultra, 1080p
Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core 3.7GHz Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB 32GB
| 30FPS, Low, 720p
Core i3-2367M 1.4GHz Intel HD Graphics 3000 Desktop 4GB
| High, 1080p
Ryzen 5 2600 GeForce GTX 1070 Ti MSI Gaming 8GB 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]
Core i7-7700K 4-Core 4.2GHz Intel HD Graphics 630 Mobile 24GB
0% No [1 votes]
| 30FPS, Low, 1080p
Core i5-7600K 3.8GHz GeForce GTX 970 MSI Gaming 4GB Edition 16GB
100% Yes [2 votes]
| 30FPS, Low, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3200G GeForce GTX 1050 Ti MSI Gaming X 4GB 8GB
50% Yes [2 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 5 2600 GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gigabyte Gaming OC 6GB 16GB
100% Yes [2 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core 3.6GHz GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Asus Phoenix 6GB 16GB
100% Yes [4 votes]
| 60FPS, Ultra, 1080p
Core i7-10750H 6-Core 2.60GHz GeForce RTX 2060 6GB 16GB
100% Yes [2 votes]
| 30FPS, Low, 720p
Pentium Gold G5500 2-Core 3.8GHz Radeon RX 550 2GB 8GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Core i5-6600K 3.5GHz GeForce GTX 1080 Ti ASUS ROG STRIX 11GB 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]