Best Gears of War Reloaded settings for PC and Steam Deck

If you're jumping back into the original Gears game with this new, definitive release, you'll need to know the best Gears of War Reloaded settings, so you can strike the ideal balance between frame rates and graphical fidelity. The OG Gears game has never looked better, and even running it at 4K with the ultra graphics preset is surprisingly easy on a relatively modern mid-range setup.

The Gears of War Reloaded system requirements notably list a ton of graphics cards across just two tiers of specs, leaving us a little confused. While we're no clearer as to why so many were present, we can safely say that you aren't going to need anywhere near the best graphics card from our extensive buying guide to run Gears of War Reloaded with great performance.

Graphics settings

• Anti-Aliasing Option: Nvidia DLSS 3.5 (FSR 3.1 for AMD GPUs)
• Resolution Scaling: DLAA (Native AA for FSR)
• Texture Quality: Ultra
• Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
• Shadow Quality: High
• Ambient Occlusion: Quality
• Motion Blur: On
• Visual Effects Quality: High
• Screen Space Reflections: High
• Flash Reduction: Off

Display settings

• Frame Rate Limit: Match monitor's maximum refresh rate (setting limit is 230)
• VSync: On
• HDR: On (if your monitor is compatible)

Using the above settings on our RTX 4070 testing rig, we achieved an average frame rate of 141fps with 1% lows of 98fps at 1,920 x 1,080. This dropped marginally to an average frame rate of 136fps with 1% lows of 92fps at 2,560 x 1,440, but a bigger drop off came when moving to 4K, where the average frame rate was 60fps with 1% lows of 45fps.

The game looks and plays fantastic at all resolutions, even if there is a bit of a drop in the numbers when moving to 4K. This is the case across both the single-player campaign with its huge set pieces and frantic combat scenarios, and fast-paced multiplayer gameplay.

While it's fair to assume that this is expected, given that Gears of War is almost 19 years old and has already undergone one visual upgrade, it's still great to see the game release with such stable performance on PC.

Best Gears of War Reloaded settings for Steam Deck

• Graphics Preset: Medium
• Anti-Aliasing: AMD FSR 3.1
• Resolution Scaling: Quality
• Frame Rate Limit: 60 (on LCD) 90(on OLED)

Gears of War Reloaded runs exceptionally well on the Steam Deck when using the medium graphics preset alongside AMD FSR 3.1 on the Quality setting. This resulted in an average frame rate of 60fps with very few noticeable drops, even when the action on screen gets hectic.

To push the game even further, you can set FSR to Balanced or Performance, the latter of which returned an average frame rate of 92fps without distorting the image quality too much on the small Deck screen. Naturally, you'll want to raise your frame rate limit if you're going to chase this higher performance, although this only benefits those using an OLED with its higher refresh rate screen.

Gears of War Reloaded graphics presets

There are five total graphics presets available in Gears of War Reloaded.

• Lowest
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Ultra

The difference between the lowest and ultra settings is humongous, as shown in the image below (right-click and open in a new tab for the original size). We can only assume that the lowest preset is for incredibly underpowered gaming PCs or handhelds, but the game doesn't look great at all, so we'd avoid using this preset if possible.

Within the graphics and display menu, there are trackers showing the predicted impact of each setting on the game's performance while also listing the available VRAM on your graphics card.

How we tested Gears of War Reloaded

At PCGamesN, we use dedicated gaming rigs to test the best settings for performance and gameplay in the latest releases. The test rig used to play Gears of War Reloaded includes the following components: Intel Core i7-11700F, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 12GB, 32GB of DDR4 3,200MHz RAM in dual-channel configuration, and an MSI B560 motherboard. We also test using Windows 11 64-bit.

We always run our testing first at 1,920 x 1,080 to identify the best settings for this entry-level resolution, then again at 2,560 x 1,440 using the same setup to gauge the difference in performance. Finally, we also test in 4K. We use CapFrameX to capture frame data and compare testing sessions.

Does Gears of War Reloaded need an SSD?

Gears of War Reloaded does not require the use of an SSD according to the system requirements. This means the game can be downloaded and booted from a traditional hard drive, but if you want to get the fastest game-loading times, it's recommended to upgrade to an SSD.

If you are interested in upgrading from an old-school mechanical drive or just need some extra storage space, you can find our current SSD recommendations in our best gaming SSD guide.

How to monitor performance in Gears of War Reloaded

If you want to keep an eye on performance in Gears of War Reloaded, we have an easy method that works whether you're using an Nvidia or AMD graphics card.

For Nvidia cards, ensure you have the Nvidia App installed and the in-game overlay enabled, and then hit ALT + R in-game to bring up your performance monitor. With AMD cards, you can enable performance monitoring via the Radeon overlay using the shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + O.

Alternatively, you can download free software such as CapFrameX or Nvidia FrameView, to get a cleaner, more simplified benchmarking tool that works with any graphics card.

With handheld gaming PCs, most will have a dedicated button to access a quick menu from which performance monitoring, sometimes called real-time monitoring, can be accessed.

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