Gears of War 4 is close to being released, and for the first time in the franchise’s history, the game is being released on both the Xbox One platform and PC at the same time, as one of Microsoft’s “Play Anywhere” titles.
Gears of War fans were no doubt delighted to hear that the fourth installment if the futuristic sci-fi video game series would be taking full advantage of their PCs. However, they might not be so thrilled to learn what exactly the game requires to run the game in its full 4K glory.
A state-of-the-art PC needed to play Gears Of War 4 in 4K
With the Gamescom video game conference currently underway in Germany, Microsoft today announced the minimum and recommended specifications for Gears of War 4’s PC version, along with footage of 4K gameplay.
Microsoft actually offered up three tiers of specifications for the game – minimum, recommended, and ideal. No matter what setting you plan on playing the game, you will need to be running Windows 10’s anniversary update to play, and you will need a mind-blowing 80 gigabytes of hard drive space to install the game.
Gears of War 4 will also run at a 4K resolution, though you will need an insanely powerful graphics card to handle it. You can check out the 4K gameplay debut from Gamescom in the video below.
Mike Rayner, the technical director of The Coalition, last month confirmed that Gears of War 4 would support 4K textures on the PC, along with support for ultra-wide monitors and unlocked framerates. Unlike the console version of the game, the PC version will allow or a wide range of graphical settings, allowing players to have full control on the graphical output of the game.
On top of the 4K gameplay demo, Microsoft announced the Windows version’s system requirements, and they are by no means modest. While players can scrape by playing the game with mid-2014 hardware as a baseline, the “ideal” Gears of War 4 experience, essentially playing in 4K, demands both a high-end AMD FX or Intel Core i7 processor as well as one of the highest-end graphics cards in recent memory, such as a Radeon R9 Fury X or a GeForce GTX 1080. Hopefully you’ve made a recent splurge purchase for your rig in the past few months.
4K video games still require beefy PC rigs
While incredibly demanding, these requirements are not necessarily surprising. 4K resolution has only just recently been able to function on PCs without using multi-card graphics solutions. It will certainly take a while before this kind of graphical power and requirements becomes accessible to the PC-gaming mainstream.
Even the latest lower-cost graphics cards, such as the Radeon RX 480 or the GeForce GTX 1060, are insufficient to power such an incredibly high resolution. Although, this could be a blessing in disguise, so if you had plans to upgrade your out-of-date PC, now could be the perfect time to do so. Otherwise you might have to settle for a lower graphics setting when the game launches.
While there still is not much information out there about the game, we do have a set release date: October 11th. The game is set 25 years after the end of Gears of War 3, and its main character is Marcus Fenix’s son, JD, along with a new crew of ‘roided-out future soldiers. In many ways, this fourth installment in the series is a fresh start. Microsoft has now taken control from Epic Games, and its Vancouver-based subsidiary, The Coalition, is in charge of development.
The multiplayer beta comes out soon, for those of us who simply cannot wait. Gamers will get full access once the game released on October 11th, and until then, the future soldier in all of us will just have to wait.
