Two days ago, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was launched on the Windows Store without any fanfare. If you want, you could purchase it right now for only RM 55. But if you own an AMD graphics card, you might want to hold off on the purchase, as it seems that the game has severe performance issues on it.
According to Jason Evangelho, a contributor to Forbes, the game runs less than stellar on an AMD graphics card. When benchmarking the game using the AMD Radeon Fury, and having its settings at 1440p with High Quality settings such as FXAA and Ambient Occlusion, the game stuttered throughout the entire duration of the benchmark.
The Fury isn’t the only card that’s been affected as runnning the game using an R9 Nano would turn the game into a slideshow, making it completely unplayable. The Fury X and the Radeon 380 are no different, as performance are said to be identical to the Radeon Fury.
Curiously enough, some AMD cards were not affected by the performance issues. ASUS’s Strix R7 370 reportedly runs rather well with no stuttering or artifacting. The Radeo 390x is completely fine too, as it managed to achieve double the framerate in the High Quality and 4K tests.
So why does the game run so poorly on AMD cards? ExtremeTech explains that it may be due to the fact that Gears of War: Ultimate Edition was developed using Unreal Engine 4. During the porting process, Digital Foundry decided to stick with the original codebase that was made in order to preserve the original simulation. The decision to use the original Unreal Engine 3-based code while also adding new features from UE4 such as DX12 and 4K support could have been the main cause of the game’s poor performance.
AMD has since issued a statement, confirming that AMD cards using GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.2 are suffering performance issues. They have also recommended that AMD users turn off the Ambient Occlusion setting. AMD is currently hard at work readying a fix that would be deployed in the coming days.
Source: Forbes, ExtremeTech
