Amidst all of the Xbox news that broke this morning, the Gears of War: Ultimate Edition finally made its debut on the Windows Store for PC gamers. Microsoft announced at E3 last summer that the remastered version of previous Gears of Wars titles would be making their way to the PC sometime after the they appear on the Xbox One.
Well, it has finally launched on PC and for $29.99 you can play Gears of War Ultimate Edition in 4K resolution, unfortunately, that is, unless you own an AMD graphics card. Reports are coming in that the game struggles to perform at even just 1080p resolution when running on certain AMD cards which utilize the Fiji architecture (such as the AMD R9 Fury). These are the higher end cards using the latest architecture launched last summer by AMD. This makes it especially frustrating for those who upgraded to Fiji cards from other cards like the Radeon 390x, which appear to be running GoW: Ultimate Edition just fine.
Microsoft released a statement in response to Forbes’ coverage of the issue, saying:
We are working closely with AMD to address a few issues that users of some AMD Radeon Hardware are experiencing while playing Gears of War: Ultimate Edition for Windows 10 and expect that they will be addressed quickly in an upcoming update
Microsoft seems to be saying this is a driver issue, as they made that the heading of their PR statement to Forbes. But it isn’t clear how this is being affected by DirectX 12. As Jason Evangelho of Forbes points out, AMD has proven to be an early leader in DirectX 12 performance with games like Ashes of Singularity. Hopefully, the problem will be fixed promptly and a fuller detailing of the problem will help prevent future repeats of the issue.
It is baffling how such a high profile game made it out to wide release on PC with a glaring issue troubling some of the highest performance graphic cards on the market. It also appears that Microsoft’s new push for cross platform gaming with dual Xbox and Windows 10 PC launches might not be as smooth a course as they hoped, which could be trouble in their campaign to win back the loyalty of gamers with attractive new features.
Are you experiencing any graphics problems with GoW: Ultimate Edition on your Windows 10 PC? Let us know in the comments section below.
