Gears of War 4, despite its woeful exclusivity to Windows Store, remains one of the best iterations of the franchise we've played – and the best on PC, of the two available on the most glorious platform. The game's overall aesthetic is cohesive and, for those first few levels, bright and punchy. As we dug deeper into the underground portion of Gears, we were met with more desaturated, foreboding tones that made Locusts visually pop. And, most importantly, it's a game with 40 graphics options, each accompanied with indicators as to expected performance. This, we think, is the saving grace to counter the game's Windows Store exclusivity.

That also makes it an excellent title for settings tweaking and tuning, though we found the presets to be generally performant across most GPUs currently out, even at High and Ultra. To play Gears of War 4 at 60FPS with High settings, we've assembled this list to build your own gaming PC around $700.

The Gears of War franchise may be 10 years old, but this fourth title is only the second to make its way to PC. Third-person shooters in general have never had as big of a following on PCs as they have on console. Gears of War, it seems, has become something of a gold standard of third-person shooters for play with dual-shock controllers. We’re here to give it a pass on the keyboard and mouse.

There are good reasons for the success of the franchise. With a controller, the dual thumbsticks of an Xbox controller suit maneuvering through cover and “locking” to walls. Then there's the trademark thickness of the characters; even normal humans stand out against other games. Against a backdrop of superfluous gore and chainsaw-guns, the Lancer, Gears of War 4 has established itself as one of the meatiest, most visceral shooters on the market.

One of the perennial remarks about the Gears of War franchise has always been the game's character design. Every male character seems have a jaw like a brick, or Robert Z’Dar, and the armor looks built of heavy metals. Now, the Gears of War franchise is five majors titles in, with novel, comic, and board game adaptations. The odd, not-entirely-human look of the characters has become a dedicated part of the franchise, and GoW4 remains true to that aesthetic. The Coalition may have taken over development from Epic, but they’ve also come a long way in design from the first Gears of War. One of the characters in this game -- Del -- even appears to have a neck. As with all the previous titles, females characters still look pretty human. 25 years older, Marcus Fenix still looks more like a bicep drawn by Rob Liefeld than a human.

We had a clerical error in our original Gears of War 4 GPU benchmark, but that's been fully rectified with this content. The error was a mix of several variables, primarily having three different folks working on the benchmarks, and working with a game that has about 40 graphics settings. We also had our custom Python script (which works perfectly) for interpreting PresentMon, a new tool to FPS capture, and that threw enough production changes into the mix that we had to unpublish the content and correct it.

All of our tests, though, were good. That's the good news. The error was in chart generation, where nVidia and AMD cards were put on the same charts using different settings, creating an unintentional misrepresentation of our data. And as a reminder, that data was valid and accurate – it just wasn't put in the right place. My apologies for that. Thankfully, we caught that early and have fixed everything.

I've been in communication with AMD and nVidia all morning, so everyone is clear on what's going on. Our 4K charts were completely accurate, but the others needed a rework. We've corrected the charts and have added several new, accurately presented tests to add some value to our original benchmark. Some of that includes, for instance, new tests that look at Ultra performance on nVidia vs AMD properly, tests that look at the 3GB vs 6GB GTX 1060, and more.e titles distributed to both PC and Xbox, generally leveraging UWP as a link.

Gears of War 4 is a DirectX 12 title. To this end, the game requires Windows 10 to play – Anniversary Edition, to be specific about what Microsoft forces users to install – and grants lower level access to the GPU via the engine. Asynchronous compute is now supported in Gears of War 4, useful for both nVidia and AMD, and dozens of graphics options make for a brilliantly complex assortment of options for PC enthusiasts. In this regard, The Coalition has done well to deliver a PC title of high flexibility, going the next step further to meticulously detail the options with CPU, GPU, and memory intensive indicators. Configure the game in an ambitious way, and it'll warn the user of a specific setting which may cause issues on the detected hardware.

That's incredible, honestly. This takes what GTA V did by adding a VRAM slider, then furthers it several steps. We cannot commend The Coalition enough for not only supporting PC players, but for doing so in a way which is so explicitly built for fine-tuning and maximizing hardware on the market.

In this benchmark of Gears of War 4, we'll test the FPS of various GPUs at Ultra and High settings (4K, 1440p, 1080p), furthering our tests by splashing in an FPS scaling chart across Low, Medium, High, and Ultra graphics. The benchmarks include the GTX 1080, 1070, 1060, RX 480, 470, and 460, and then further include last gen's GTX 980 Ti, 970, 960, and 950 with AMD's R9 Fury X, R9 390X, and R9 380X.

The Coalition's Gears of War 4 demonstrated the capabilities of nVidia's new GTX 1070-enabled notebooks, operating at 4K with fully maxed-out graphics options. View our Pascal notebook article for more information on the specifics of the hardware. While at the event in England, we took notes of the game's complete graphics settings and some notes on graphics setting impact on the GPU and CPU. The Coalition may roll-out additional settings by the game's October launch.

We tested Gears of War 4 on the new MSI GT73 notebook with 120Hz display and a GTX 1070 (non-M) GPU. The notebook was capable of pushing maxed settings at 1080p and, a few pre-release bugs aside (pre-production hardware and an unfinished game), gameplay ran in excess of 60FPS.

We've got an early look at Gears of War 4's known graphics settings, elevated framerate, async compute, and dynamic resolution support. Note that the Gears team has promised “more than 30 graphics settings,” so we'll likely see a few more in the finished product. Here are our photos of the graphics options menu:

Windows 10 games distribution platform UWP has previously forced V-Sync onto users, but has become toggleable for Gears of War 4, Mark Reyner told Eurogamer. Among other technical changes, Gears of War 4 appears to be shaping up to be a proper benchmark title for our future GPU reviews. The game will host a benchmark mode – always a plus – while unlocking the framerate and adding super-resolution support. That means, like Shadow of Mordor and similar games, players will be able to run the game at whatever resolution they want. It’s similar to DSR/VSR in that the game renders at the higher resolution, then down scales to fit the display. This results in greater pixel density and increases clarity.