Gaming Tests: Gears Tactics

Remembering the original Gears of War brings back a number of memories – some good, and some involving online gameplay. The latest iteration of the franchise was launched as I was putting this benchmark suite together, and Gears Tactics is a high-fidelity turn-based strategy game with an extensive single player mode. As with a lot of turn-based games, there is ample opportunity to crank up the visual effects, and here the developers have put a lot of effort into creating effects, a number of which seem to be CPU limited.

Gears Tactics has an in-game benchmark, roughly 2.5 minutes of AI gameplay starting from the same position but using a random seed for actions. Much like the racing games, this usually leads to some variation in the run-to-run data, so for this benchmark we are taking the geometric mean of the results. One of the biggest things that Gears Tactics can do is on the resolution scaling, supporting 8K, and so we are testing the following settings:

  • 720p Low, 4K Low, 8K Low, 1080p Ultra

For results, the game showcases a mountain of data when the benchmark is finished, such as how much the benchmark was CPU limited and where, however none of that is ever exported into a file we can use. It’s just a screenshot which we have to read manually.

If anyone from the Gears Tactics team wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).

As with the other benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed. For this benchmark, we manually read each of the screenshots for each quality/setting/run combination. The benchmark does also give 95th percentiles and frame averages, so we can use both of these data points.

AnandTech Low Resolution
Low Quality
Medium Resolution
Low Quality
High Resolution
Low Quality
Medium Resolution
Max Quality
Average FPS
95th Percentile

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

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  • madymadme - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Going to buy
    AMD Ryzen 9 5900X,
    Gigabyte B550 AORUS PRO AC,
    Noctua NH-D15 Dual 140m Fans,
    G.skill Trident Z RGB Series 16GB (2x8GB) 4000 MHz DDR4 Memory F4-4000C18D-16GTZRB

    is corsair CV550 watt ok with the above spec ? & I have Quadro K2000D graphic card
    is this specification ok ? & which ram to get please help a little & thanks for reading & replying
  • Spunjji - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    All I can say is your PSU should be more than enough for that setup :)
  • Vik32 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    AMD is now the leader in single threaded performance!
    When will the iphone 12 review ?
  • Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Loving the substantial review detail, as always! Quite the triumph for AMD 😁

    Only one minor criticism - the sum-up of the gaming results buries the lede a little, which is to say that the performance is excellent across AMD's new range, meaning that the 5600X frequently outperforms some of Intel's best processors. I will be *very* interested to see if overclocking makes any difference there - with some relaxed power limits and the potential for higher clocks, it could be THE gaming chip to buy.

    That's a small gripe, though. Just pleased to see a result this unequivocal. Between this and the US election result, it'll be tears before bedtime for several of the trolls on this site 🤭
  • Solidstate20 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Zen question: If a CPU has awesome performance but is out-of-stock in every shop, does it really have awesome performance?
  • Spunjji - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    lol
  • Agent Smith - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Where are the new x590 motherboards to support the 5000 series CPU's?

    The B550 boards are good value but are PCIe 4.0 limited and rely on shared ports.
    The older x570 boards are good but are several years old now so lacking newer features like 2.5Gb LAN and front facing USB-C ports for mini & micro ITX.
  • Qasar - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    i dont think there will be unless the mobo makers release them on their own.

    "The older x570 boards are good but are several years old now " huh ? try barely 1.5 years old. x570 was released in July 2019, how is that several years ? the strix e gaming board i have has 2.5g lan, as long as the board has the usb 3 header, wouldnt front facing usbc be more of a case feature then the board ?
  • Spunjji - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    I think the USB-C front ports have a different connector at the motherboard end. I still don't get why this is a big deal, though.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link

    It really isnt. I dont know anyone who actually uses front USB C right now, usually they plug into the back because the back port will be 10gb/20gb/thunderbolt, but the front is only 5gb

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