Gears of War PC: A complete disaster on GCN1.2 cards in Microsoft's own game + API debut

[Anarchist4000]

NEW RENDERING FEATURES IN DX12:

Conservative Rasterization

Conservative Rasterization adds some certainty to pixel rendering, which is helpful in particular to collision detection algorithms.

Indirect Drawing

Indirect drawing enables some scene-traversal and culling to be moved from the CPU to the GPU, which can improve performance. The command buffer can be generated by the CPU or GPU.

Rasterizer Ordered Views

Rasterizer ordered views (ROVs) allow pixel shader code to mark UAV bindings with a declaration that alters the normal requirements for the order of graphics pipeline results for UAVs. This enables Order Independent Transparency (OIT) algorithms to work, which give much better rendering results when multiple transparent objects are in line with each other in a view.

Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value

Enabling pixel shaders to output the Stencil Reference Value, rather than using the API-specified one, enables a very fine granular control over stencil operations.

Swap Chains

Swap chains control the back buffer rotation, forming the basis of graphics animation.

Direct3D 11.3 Features

The following sections describe the functionality has been added in Direct3D 11.3. These features are also available in Direct3D 12.
In this section

TopicDescription
Conservative Rasterization

Conservative rasterization adds some certainty to pixel rendering, which is helpful in particular to collision detection algorithms.
Default Texture Mapping

The use of default texture mapping reduces copying and memory usage while sharing image data between the GPU and the CPU. However, it should only be used in specific situations. The standard swizzle layout avoids copying or swizzling data in multiple layouts.
Rasterizer Order Views

Rasterizer ordered views (ROVs) allow pixel shader code to mark UAV bindings with a declaration that alters the normal requirements for the order of graphics pipeline results for UAVs. This enables Order Independent Transparency (OIT) algorithms to work, which give much better rendering results when multiple transparent objects are in line with each other in a view.
Shader Specified Stencil Reference Value

Enabling pixel shaders to output the Stencil Reference Value, rather than using the API-specified one, enables a very fine granular control over stencil operations.
Typed Unordered Access View Loads

Unordered Access View (UAV) Typed Load is the ability for a shader to read from a UAV with a specific DXGI_FORMAT.
Unified Memory Architecture

Querying for whether Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) is supported can help determine how to handle some resources.
Volume Tiled Resources

Volume (3D) textures can be used as tiled resources, noting that tile resolution is three-dimensional.

Direct3D 11.3 Features (Windows)

Not sure I'd call those new features with DX12. More like what Microsoft originally intended for DX12 to be prior to mantle. DX12 really is about the low level explicit and async stuff for engine developers. All these features should be extensions like Vulkan does to allow new effects.

It's doubtful we'll see much use out of the features for a few years because of lack of hardware support. Only Maxwell2 and probably Polaris/Pascal can likely use all of them. Devs are probably far more concerned about getting a solid multi-threaded DX12/Vulkan engine going at this point. I'm sure we'll see some of them show up, but I wouldn't expect heavy usage until 2017 onward.

 

[Bowman15]

where was I wrong why don't you read I don't care if people aren't using it, the features are available, that was the point. I'm not saying one is better than the other, or one is a worth while investment either. Its just that availability of those features are there. How was I wrong about that?

Direct3D 11.3 Features (Windows)

DX11 does not have all the new features DX12 does. So what it has a couple of the same features. That is not all that DX12 offers, its just the rendering part I pointed out in 15 seconds of Googling. I can do more but why, your wrong?

 

[razor1]

Then check the specific API for the graphics cards, for vendor specific. They do have them......

API's only expose the hardware features, saying that they can't be exposed through another API outside of the latest and greatest is kinda stupid lol. They can be exposed if the hardware is there. And in this specific case, they are there if you look at the vendor specific extensions. yeah the 15 seconds in google, you could have used the toilet and it would have gave you a different answer

 

[razor1]

Direct3D 11.3 Features (Windows)

Not sure I'd call those new features with DX12. More like what Microsoft originally intended for DX12 to be prior to mantle. DX12 really is about the low level explicit and async stuff for engine developers. All these features should be extensions like Vulkan does to allow new effects.

It's doubtful we'll see much use out of the features for a few years because of lack of hardware support. Only Maxwell2 and probably Polaris/Pascal can likely use all of them. Devs are probably far more concerned about getting a solid multi-threaded DX12/Vulkan engine going at this point. I'm sure we'll see some of them show up, but I wouldn't expect heavy usage until 2017 onward.

Yeah, the main issue is current engine technology doesn't use multi threading to a high extent and this is the problem when porting engines to DX12 or Vulkan, the feature set is really a non issue. But to take advantage of multiple cores takes a complete engine rewrite or easier to remake an engine at this point.

 

[Pieter3dnow]

Once again, you're missing the point. DX12 does not have any 'features' beyond 'allowing developers to code closer to the metal'. It's not like DX11 that 'introduced' hardware tessellation, or DX10 that 'introduced' the compute shader: Direct X 12 does not 'introduce' anything other than coding closer to the metal. Asynchronous Shading, Asymetric multi-GPU, multithreaded rendering: these are not 'features' of DX12. These are 'coding techniques' that DX12 allows developers to utilise IF THEY WANT TO PUT IN THE TIME AND CODE THESE FEATURES THEMSELVES. essentially, DX12 may as well be DX11 in the hands of the lazy developer.

NO! I will tell you why this is a false narrative even tho factually you are _not_ wrong, even if developers are not bound to do anything regarding DX12 (time and effort you spotted that well with GoW UE not that much I guess) it still is not something that would _need_ DirectX 12 to function in the way that it absolutely needs to be done this way. And this game is not it it could have as well been made in OpenGL or DX9.

Unless you are not viewing this as a consumer related problem where DX12 becomes a check mark feature rather then something special which with the right developers.
I don't mind this title being something called a DX12 title but it is far from that hence the shuffle ware from 2006 comment.

Everyone knows that MS are idiots this proves it again call your game DX12 people see it as shuffle ware from 2006 with a different name and think is this why "we" bought Windows 10...

 

[heatlesssun]

Everyone knows that MS are idiots this proves it again call your game DX12 people see it as shuffle ware from 2006 with a different name and think is this why "we" bought Windows 10...

Huh? It's a remastered game with updated visuals, not exactly something new.

 

[Pieter3dnow]

Huh? It's a remastered game with updated visuals, not exactly something new.

You forgot checkmark DX12 feature also there with hidden HBAO+ setting and supposedly PhySX which can't be disabled .

 

[heatlesssun]

You forgot checkmark DX12 feature also there with hidden HBAO+ setting and supposedly PhySX which can't be disabled .

The description on the Windows Store doesn't highlight DX 12. It mentions that it's required but then Windows 10 version 1511 is required anyway.

 

[razor1]

You forgot checkmark DX12 feature also there with hidden HBAO+ setting and supposedly PhySX which can't be disabled .

Phys X is part of the UE3 engine and always has been not to mention its only the CPU version of Phys X, so don't even know why you are bringing that up, its not like its going to work better or worse depending on the graphics card. And HBAO issue seems to have been fixed, and the performance drop is small on both IHV's.

Why are you complaining about something that you probably didn't even buy?

 

[misterbobby]

Phys X is part of the UE3 engine and always has been not to mention its only the CPU version of Phys X, so don't even know why you are bringing that up, its not like its going to work better or worse depending on the graphics card. And HBAO issue seems to have been fixed, and the performance drop is small on both IHV's.

Why are you complaining about something that you probably didn't even buy?

One of the complaints is that it had hardware accelerated physx on by default in the BaseEngine.ini and it could not be disabled. I think its irrelevant though as the game does not use any hardware accelerated physx though.

 

[razor1]

I just checked the BaseEngine.ini

bDisablePhysXHardwareSupport=False

That is the default setting as I haven't even opened this file before. That means its the CPU version of physX if I'm not mistaken if there are no GPU physX available to run.

 

[KazeoHin]

Direct3D 12 Programming Guide (Windows)

As mentioned before, many MANY others beat me to the punch: DX11.3 was introduced for the sole reason of adding API acess to added hardware functions without the low-level coding needed to properly implement DX12. On a feature bullet-point, DX12 has no 'unique hardware feature'. This is why a 3-year-old 7970 can run DX12-level 'features', despite it being a 'dx11' level product. These 'features' are present in later versions of DX11.

 

[misterbobby]

I just checked the BaseEngine.ini

bDisablePhysXHardwareSupport=False

That is the default setting as I haven't even opened this file before. That means its the CPU version of physX if I'm not mistaken if there are no GPU physX available to run.

No it says false for disable which means its enabled...

 

[razor1]

yes but the effects that that particular game uses doesn't uses GPU based physics. PhysX at that time on the GPU was used for particles (derbies) and cloth, which neither of those are present at that time and neither of them are in the remastered game. Smoke and interactive water with PhysX came much later in games although it was shown off with Unreal Engine 2.5 but not used in games till fluid dynamics were able to be rendered with proper frame rates which came out last generation.

 

[noko]

At least the poopy performing games for my hardware I have no interest in playing. Another GameWorks wonder too

 

[Pieter3dnow]

Phys X is part of the UE3 engine and always has been not to mention its only the CPU version of Phys X, so don't even know why you are bringing that up, its not like its going to work better or worse depending on the graphics card. And HBAO issue seems to have been fixed, and the performance drop is small on both IHV's.
Why are you complaining about something that you probably didn't even buy?

No I was listing features of this great DX12 game. It makes DX12 shine it shows what you can do if you are handed the opportunity to use the close to metal API to the max ...

 

[razor1]

what is close to the API, you mean close to metal? Which actually originally came form motorcycle, or motor engine talk.....

what does PhysX have to do with Dx12?

what does HBAO+ have do with Dx12?

You just like to try to sway a conversation to nV vs. AMD do you? Why do you that instead of actually talk about what we were talking about, you take an interesting conversation and throw mud at it.

 

[JustReason]

I guess plain and simple this game is a DX9 port to DX12 as minimalistic as possible, hence the 2 core limit. It does concern me some that porting over may bring out issues because of the extra work necessary to make it transition. Unfortunately slapping DX12 on a game does little for what DX12 can do when done right. Instances like this don't help.

 

[razor1]

well we have seen that most of the time when an engine is ported from any dx version to a new dx version that is nothing new and actually it is to be expected. API expose hardware features to the programmer in certain ways, there are limits to how a programmer can use those features which are also set by the API (there are cleaver ways to get around those limits at times but they tend to hard to find and also hard to implement as well), so for a given API that a program is tailored to, the only way to get full benefits from an updated API is a full rewrite. Even current DX11 engines require the same thing. There is no way around that.

 

[ChosenUno]

MS should've just made the remake a DX11-done-right instead of a DX12-shitty-marquee.

I wonder if this will be an indication of what's to come with games getting DX12 patches.

 

[Pieter3dnow]

what is close to the API, you mean close to metal? Which actually originally came form motorcycle, or motor engine talk.....
You just like to try to sway a conversation to nV vs. AMD do you? Why do you that instead of actually talk about what we were talking about, you take an interesting conversation and throw mud at it.

There is not much to talk about a shuffle ware game which has some questionable features. Just wanted to point that out to Heatlesssun.
The only thing I thrown around was that this is the most uninspiring title that uses DX12 (uses is a misnomer) and I hope it will be the last that will ever be released.

 

[cageymaru]

Don't have time to play the game extensively today, but this is the result of the new patch and AMD 16.3 drivers on the game as far as the benchmark goes on the highest settings @1080p. Hopefully the game will play as well as the benchmark runs. May never need a new system if I keep swapping out hardware for larger drives and faster video cards. 5 year old system still hanging in there.

#Timeless

 

[ManofGod]

Don't have time to play the game extensively today, but this is the result of the new patch and AMD 16.3 drivers on the game as far as the benchmark goes on the highest settings @1080p. Hopefully the game will play as well as the benchmark runs. May never need a new system if I keep swapping out hardware for larger drives and faster video cards. 5 year old system still hanging in there.

#Timeless


View attachment 899

Is the game update automatically installed or did you have to initiate it? Thanks.

 

[cageymaru]

Is the game update automatically installed or did you have to initiate it? Thanks.

Had to initiate it. I'm talking about the same patch from a couple of days ago. It fixed some but not all of the stuttering. The AMD driver seems to have cured the rest, but I haven't played but 15 minutes today. It was very smooth for the most part. I had a "I just died so it has to have been the game's fault" moment and cut it off.

Ha ha. You know how that goes.

 

[cageymaru]

First benchmarks say that AMD performance is up, but still not great. Ball back into The Coalition's court to fix the game more.
OC3D :: Review :: Gears of War: Ultimate Edition PC Performance Retest with AMD Crimson 16.3 Drivers :: Gears of War: Ultimate Edition PC Performance Retest with Crimson 16.3 Drivers

To conclude the past week has been very good for Gear of War: Ultimate Edition's performance on AMD hardware, with our R9 380 and R9 Fury X GPUs performing much better in the game almost regardless of what settings or resolutions we use. The AMD performance in this game is still very disappointing when compared to Nvidia, but at least AMD hardware is usable now.

Hopefully The Coalition will continue to work on Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on order to further improve AMD's GPU performance, but at least right now the game has became playable at lower resolutions.

 

[Deathroned]

Nvidia strikes again another gameworst title aint it funny gaming evolved and the way its meant to be played which are non gameworst games come out fine no problems etc. Then game worst strikes my oh my and Razor to the rescue trying to convince people otherwise that GameWorst isnt to blame.

 

[Ticker305]

Good to hear the games more or less fixed at this point for both teams but I'm still trying to wrap my head around Microsoft's decision to release this in a broken state. Being this was the first dx12 release it sure left a bad first impression on a lot of people especially for the windows store ms is so desperately trying to push. It's not like the PC community was clamoring for this 10 year old remake, another week or two taken to fine tune it and send AMD a copy so they could tweak the drivers would have spared them alot of negative press, especially from an already skeptical playerbase who has been burned by MS limp dicked attempts at gaining PC players trust in the past. After the recent dx12 hype video they recently released the majority of comments I read were skepitcaly dismissive and referenced the half ass broken gears release. If they wanna gain the PC trust back why not release hype video first then release a polished dx12 game to build on that hype, typical ass backward MS as usual.

 

[razor1]

Nvidia strikes again another gameworst title aint it funny gaming evolved and the way its meant to be played which are non gameworst games come out fine no problems etc. Then game worst strikes my oh my and Razor to the rescue trying to convince people otherwise that GameWorst isnt to blame.

Only an person that has nothing else better to do but blame something they don't understand, could see the faults were on Coalitions end for not doing the fixes they had to do before release, it was on their end and the problems were fixed quite quickly (graphics bugs and most of the shuttering).

Hey you, bowmen, and the wantapple, should join together and make a cabal of conspiracy theories and talk about how 9/11 was concocted by the CIA... Hmm might already have done that, or better yet it was gameworks fault... no it wasn't that, its world hunger is what gameworks created, wait, how about global warning... no gameworks was used to create the moon landing conspiracy too.... how about one gameworks to rule them all!

Yes that is it!

 

[cageymaru]

Good to hear the games more or less fixed at this point for both teams but I'm still trying to wrap my head around Microsoft's decision to release this in a broken state. Being this was the first dx12 release it sure left a bad first impression on a lot of people especially for the windows store ms is so desperately trying to push. It's not like the PC community was clamoring for this 10 year old remake, another week or two taken to fine tune it and send AMD a copy so they could tweak the drivers would have spared them alot of negative press, especially from an already skeptical playerbase who has been burned by MS limp dicked attempts at gaining PC players trust in the past. After the recent dx12 hype video they recently released the majority of comments I read were skepitcaly dismissive and referenced the half ass broken gears release. If they wanna gain the PC trust back why not release hype video first then release a polished dx12 game to build on that hype, typical ass backward MS as usual.

Now the deal with older cards like the R9 290, 290X, 390, etc is that we never had bad frame rates. It was that the game literally froze for 3 second periods over and over again. That's what articles on the web call "stutter". Of course the enemies were still shooting so you could imagine how that went. I can't see my frame rate due to Windows Store bullsh*t. I can tell you that this morning it was very fluid for the most part, but there were some periods that I could tell that the next area was loading. It wasn't a stutter like before; it just felt "off". It's quite playable though.

The Nano, 380 (x), and Fury series had all the graphical corruption issues at launch. They are the ones that should benefit the most from the patch and subsequent driver release. I never had that level of failure in my experience, but I've seen the videos of it.

I would never play a PvP session in this game due to it ignoring my commands at points. In the beginning of the game there is a circular fountain I guess. Anyways my NPC teammates all hid behind it. I figured it would be a good idea to copy them. Wrong! I spammed the hell out of the cover button and was gunned down over the course of 10 seconds or more as my character had a Tony Montana moment. He decided he was Scarface and just stood there and ate all of the bullets.

When the enemies came out to start the fight, the game didn't feel "fluid". Then me getting gunned down signified to me that I have a helluva lot more games in my Steam library with GameWorks features that actually work after patching; why am I torturing myself with this pseudo DX12 crap? So I rage quit and posted my frame rate.

That's my experience as a Windows Store / Gears of War paying customer beta tester. Aka jackass that bought the game without reading a review because I knew my buddy was going to get it as he is completely addicted to GoW. Luckily I was able to save him the grief of the game at launch. What a good Samaritan I am.

 

[Anarchist4000]

I guess plain and simple this game is a DX9 port to DX12 as minimalistic as possible, hence the 2 core limit. It does concern me some that porting over may bring out issues because of the extra work necessary to make it transition. Unfortunately slapping DX12 on a game does little for what DX12 can do when done right. Instances like this don't help.

I'm curious just what they were messing up. Unless it was simply available memory pool. DX12 would be a lot easier if you could just load everything into memory and not worry about it. For an old game with limited resources I could see this being ideal.

Good to hear the games more or less fixed at this point for both teams but I'm still trying to wrap my head around Microsoft's decision to release this in a broken state. Being this was the first dx12 release it sure left a bad first impression on a lot of people especially for the windows store ms is so desperately trying to push. It's not like the PC community was clamoring for this 10 year old remake, another week or two taken to fine tune it and send AMD a copy so they could tweak the drivers would have spared them alot of negative press, especially from an already skeptical playerbase who has been burned by MS limp dicked attempts at gaining PC players trust in the past. After the recent dx12 hype video they recently released the majority of comments I read were skepitcaly dismissive and referenced the half ass broken gears release. If they wanna gain the PC trust back why not release hype video first then release a polished dx12 game to build on that hype, typical ass backward MS as usual.

Not sure I'd call it the first DX12 title. There was Caffeine or whatever that I'd consider on par with this release. Releasing what looks like a botched port of an old title is hardly what I'd call a relevant DX12 title. This seems far more like the dev messed up the memory management and Nvidia already had a driver fix in place to accommodate it. A fix that ultimately shouldn't be necessary to cover sloppy work by a developer. Come to think of it, they probably used sparse textures for everything to handle memory management. I know that was a feature AMD didn't have fully implemented in the original Vulkan drivers, maybe DX12 was the same.

 

[sblantipodi]

hope to see GOW 2 and 3 and 4 on PC.
I will not buy this version if they will not do 2 and 3 and 4.

 

[FrameBuffer]

Dev update:

Updates coming to Gears: UE for Windows 10 - Updated March 13 | Technical Support and Help | Forums | Gears of War - Official Site



We have an update scheduled for next week that contains the following:

• Performance optimizations
• Refactor of texture settings to better reflect VRAM requirements and to better manage the texture levels for each setting.
• Ambient Occlusion tweaks.
• Tuned mouse coming out of roadie run.
• Disabled mouse smoothing.

We will also be deploying some updated optimized playlists to help with matchmaking. We were hoping to get these out before the weekend but will instead get these out early next week.

There are some common questions that I’d like to cover here.

Textures not loading
This will be improved by the update next week. We’ll continue to make improvements here where we can.

NAT problems
We are looking into why this is happening. While we work on discovering the root cause, we are discussing changes we can do to help matchmaking if you are erroneously given the wrong NAT type.

Long Queues
Our playlist change coming early next week should help with this.

21:9 Support
We hear you and we are adding ultra-wide resolutions to the game.

Mouse Acceleration
Our update next week will disable mouse smoothing and increase the responsiveness coming out of roadie run. I’ll continue to read the feedback after the update.

Achievements not unlocking
We’re working on tracking down the reason this would happen.

 

[pandora's box]

Is GSYNC fixed yet?

 

[cageymaru]

Dev update:

Updates coming to Gears: UE for Windows 10 - Updated March 13 | Technical Support and Help | Forums | Gears of War - Official Site



We have an update scheduled for next week that contains the following:

• Performance optimizations
• Refactor of texture settings to better reflect VRAM requirements and to better manage the texture levels for each setting.
• Ambient Occlusion tweaks.
• Tuned mouse coming out of roadie run.
• Disabled mouse smoothing.

We will also be deploying some updated optimized playlists to help with matchmaking. We were hoping to get these out before the weekend but will instead get these out early next week.

There are some common questions that I’d like to cover here.

Textures not loading
This will be improved by the update next week. We’ll continue to make improvements here where we can.

NAT problems
We are looking into why this is happening. While we work on discovering the root cause, we are discussing changes we can do to help matchmaking if you are erroneously given the wrong NAT type.

Long Queues
Our playlist change coming early next week should help with this.

21:9 Support
We hear you and we are adding ultra-wide resolutions to the game.

Mouse Acceleration
Our update next week will disable mouse smoothing and increase the responsiveness coming out of roadie run. I’ll continue to read the feedback after the update.

Achievements not unlocking
We’re working on tracking down the reason this would happen.

Access to Game Files (INI's)
I'm looking into what we can do here.

Other items we are working on:
- Reducing hitches on start of level.
- Reducing hitches when streaming level chunks.
- Reducing audio stutter on older CPU’s.

Please continue to provide feedback and ask questions in our Technical Support forum as we are always listening. We greatly appreciate the feedback and thanks again for the support.

The hitching is what makes the game not as enjoyable.

 

[Sharps97]

Just got this and tested on high settings at 4K on my Fury X. Averages about 35 fps with highs in the low 40's. Smooth performance (on the benchmark). Will do more testing later. But feels good now!

 

[ManofGod]

Just got this and tested on high settings at 4K on my Fury X. Averages about 35 fps with highs in the low 40's. Smooth performance (on the benchmark). Will do more testing later. But feels good now!

That's what I call a fast fix, sounds good to me.

 

[FrameBuffer]

DAAMMNN
OC3D :: Review :: Gear of War: Ultimate Edition Performance Retest - The Game has been Fixed! :: Introduction

So let me guess, GOWUE is no longer a true representation of DX12 anymore /snark

 

[heatlesssun]

DAAMMNN
OC3D :: Review :: Gear of War: Ultimate Edition Performance Retest - The Game has been Fixed! :: Introduction

So let me guess, GOWUE is no longer a true representation of DX12 anymore /snark

It's not like we don't see plenty of PC games have issues when initially released and then get patched. Not exactly a great trend. The real issue for many still though is the Windows Store and issues still surrounding universal Windows apps like overlays and locked vsync. But things will improve in those areas. The biggest issues are political. The idea of Microsoft with a curated app store is just going to rub some people the wrong way. Open Win32 ever or bust.

 

[razor1]

DAAMMNN
OC3D :: Review :: Gear of War: Ultimate Edition Performance Retest - The Game has been Fixed! :: Introduction

So let me guess, GOWUE is no longer a true representation of DX12 anymore /snark

LOL yep it still definitely isn't, it must have been sabotaged by gameworks,lol.

 

[Mahigan]

GoW UE, whether AMD or nVIDIA lead, is not a true DX12 title. Fans on both sides keep claiming that a UE3 engine based game can truly take advantage of DX12 but that's not really possible.

I spoke to Dan Baker about this as well as his opinion was that, absent a near complete re-write of the engine, UE3 wouldn't be able to truly take advantage of DX12. His opinion is that it wouldn't be worth a complete re-write and that devs would be better off using UE4.