I got a chance to put in a little bit of time with Gears 4. To read more about what people here are saying about the actual game play check out
this thread. I decided to make this separate post about what I was seeing specifically with the PC version of the game.
The game defaulted to all ultra settings for me and when I ran the in-game benchmark it said I was averaging 88 FPS at 1440p. When I actually play the game I will have VSYNC active so I will be limited to 60 FPS but it's good to know that I have lots of headroom.
It's actually a pretty helpful benchmark to run because it shows you what part of your system is limiting your FPS. In my case it was the GPU 95% of the time which is a good thing. I would hate to have my powerful 1070 being held back because I didn't have enough VRAM, RAM, or CPU speed to keep up with the game's demands.
I also really like that each visual setting tells you how much impact it is going to have on your GPU, CPU, and VRAM. My old 970s had stuttering problems with some games that used more than 3.5GB of VRAM. The game pointing out which settings used the most VRAM would have been really helpful for tweaking if I was still using those cards.
Speaking of VRAM, I ran HWInfo while I messed around with Horde mode and it says that my VRAM usage topped out at around 7.2GB of usage and averaged about 6GB of usage. Textures are the biggest VRAM hog and I am running ultra. I am also playing at 1440p which uses quite a bit more VRAM than 1080p. The reason I point this out is because other VRAM hog games I have tested at 1440p like Forza Horizon 3 and Arkham Knight top out at just over 5GB. I have never seen any of my other games pass the 6GB VRAM mark, let alone 7GB.
While the game does look like a VRAM hog on GPUs that have 8GB of available VRAM like my 1070 I have read benchmarks that show it running fine on cards with 4GB of VRAM.
yourbeliefs has already said it runs well on his 4GB 960 too. I have read that some games will fill as much VRAM as they have available even if they don't actually need that much VRAM to run smoothly just because it is faster than pulling textures from the hard drive. That could be an explanation for why I saw 7.2GB of VRAM usage while the game still runs fine with 4GB.
I haven't played any of the campaign yet but from my time with Horde mode the game ran locked at a perfect 60 FPS with VSYNC enabled. Without VSYNC it looks like I would be averaging in the upper 80s but I would rather eliminate screen tearing.
