Tweet
It's an enticing proposition. Microsoft has remastered Gears of War for Xbox One and PC in a new Ultimate Edition featuring massively improved visuals and a smooth 60 frames per second - in multiplayer at least. Following Monday's E3 conference, beta codes for the Xbox One version began to roll out, and luckily enough, we were one of the first to receive them.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Ultimate Edition is utilising a mature version of Unreal Engine 3 rather than the new UE4 engine powering Gears 4. The groundbreaking original release was one of the very first UE3 titles on the market almost ten years ago, so in theory moving to the latest iteration of the engine brings a lot to the table (the extent of which should be more pronounced in the single-player campaign). In addition, this isn't a simple repurposing of assets either, but rather a full-on remake using an entirely new set of textures, models, and effects. While the transformation isn't as dramatic as Halo 2: Anniversary, the changes are definitely more significant than we expected.
The basics are all there as well - a full 1920x1080 frame-buffer with a smattering of FXAA for good measure. UE3 titles for Xbox 360 were known to use 2x MSAA fairly early in the rendering cycle with spotty results but, even if that still is the case on Xbox One, the end results are nearly imperceptible through the veil of post-process anti-aliasing. There is a fair amount of shimmering objects along with typical post-AA blur, but overall image quality is attractive, and a huge boost over the original Xbox 360 game. That said, upon revisiting the original, we were surprised at how nicely the image quality manages to hold up, even at 720p.
Read more…
More...