@@amgoingmad It's a micro stutter you feel when traversing the world. As you move through levels and new parts load, Unreal Engine always has a bottleneck where the game "stutters" noticeably due to the loading of new assets. It's kind of like how games stutter when you autosave/quicksave them.
Unreal 5 has a feature built in now to cache all the shaders so it has been fixed it's just whether the studio has enough QA to comb the game well enough to actually cache all of it.
Around this time, most consoles were still being played on CRT screens while 99% of PC players were on terrible looking LCD panels. Perhaps this is why they tweaked the post processing so much for the PC port. Crushing the contrast would’ve helped the look of it on those horribly low contrast early LCD panels.
@@fvallo Not me lol. I got a 1080i Sony Trinitron that I kept up until just two years ago. You’d never know it was 1080i and not 1080p, especially because its native res was actually 1920x1080. Best deinterlacing of all time, looked beautiful on 720p too. But my god did 360 games look gorgeous on that thing. I even gamed on it up until like 2016. Destiny on PS4 was like a prerendered CG film on that TV.
I have a really nice 32 inch Panasonic Tau Giga 480p progressive scan TV I used with 360. It was amazing color. To be honest though a 65 inch OLED is great to use with 360 today anyway as it is for original Xbox too with a HDMI adapter.
That's a Fantastic Take Away! Despite how Intelligent someone can be, They aren't immune from being Stupid. It sucks that, that one simple variable is what caused us to have issues with the Presentation and their attempt of Comparison. John may have had to turn his Brightness up so much because he is using a more modern display.
Those xbox 360 textures are brutal as well as those stutters at 7:40 or so... lol it just got better, your guys' absolute confusion at the slow texture loading was fantastic
The color difference between Gears 1 on X360 and PC is that EPIC was using 24 bit color on X360 for some parts of lighting/color, that could fit on eSRAM. PC has either 16 bit color (like in thr 90s) or 32 bit color. Problem is 24 bit color doesn't simply "fit" within a 32 bit buffer, 24 bit color is rounded up to 32 bit. So errors or deviations happened early on UE3' life. The color precision difference of Xbox 360 is one of the major pain points of X360 emulator, Xenia.
That's really confusing to me, most PC "32-bit" is R8G8B8X8 (eg 8 padding bits) or similar (with alpha or in BGR order) There are larger color spaces, like R10G10B10X2, but I think they came later. In any case, while the precision difference would be a factor to getting reproducible post effects and the like, it wouldn't have this sort of effect on the whole scene brightness scale and tone.
@@SimonBuchanNz You seem right on that. There was the possibility of some differences when calculating various sharers but that was something to would have more been an issue on the Nvidia pipeline than the AMD. Particularly with the FX variable shader depth issues. On Gears PC it looks like an artistic change rather than a technical.
I feel like some of the bloom/over saturation can be contributed to playing at full brightness on 360. It's not multiplayer, you can turn down the brightness a little
@@Brunn0121 It absolutely doesn't. The default is exactly in the middle. Back in the day I would even darken a bit by two presses of d-pad to the left for better contrast on my monitor. That was the switch spot for me. lol
@@thiagovidal6137 doesn't the game ask you to tweak the brightness when you boot it up for the first time? IIRC, I played the games just like you, two DPad presses left of center.
@@halofreak1990 Don't remember if it does, but even if it did, the default would still be the middle. John definitely manually cranked that up. Maybe by accident. I'm surprised they spent so much time talking about the brightness different in confusion without noticing the x360 version was at high brightness settings.
John has the brightness cranked up in his game :( Weird because he goes to video settings and you can see it right there and makes both versions look way different. I really want this video done right :( I’m sorry!
@@ChuckLopez same here it’s still bugging me. It ruins the video, maybe they can add the correct footage later? And note to ignore the comments about the contrast and the bloom etc.
Yes, especially UE3 games had those. On Xbox 360 there were developers who made a good use of streaming from both DVD and HDD, saturating the bandwidth. In fact, when X360 firmware allowed to install all game data to HDD, this functionality ruined some. For example, Halo 3. But later on, BF3 also put that dual streaming method to good use and installing a whole game made it look and run worse 😂 I've recently duested off my PS3 "Super slim" and started to collect a games for it. Back in the day, there were many people which I've bought digitally. I've put a SATA SSD to see if it will make a noticeable difference in titles which had pop-in issues and while these are not completely gone in all games, they are less pronounced. And in titles where these issues weren't that big if a problem in the first place, it removes them completely. I've played through Doom 3 BFG edition and saw no single instance of texture being late to load. Which suggests that bandwidth to move the data was there all the time, but HDD was holding hardware back from achieving full potential. Oh, load times are much better too. In a hindsight, this made me realise how Sony and MS cheaper out on PS4 and Xbox One. If they couldn't make SSD feasible fit into spec at targeted price, they should at least go for 7200 rpm HDD, preferably hybrid one with like 4 GB of flash cache. I used one of those in PC back in the day, not as good as SSD, but notable jump in quality of experience over lousy 5400 rpm.
@@kamilciura7953When Xbox one and PS4 came out, SSDs were still very expensive, only some enthusiasts on PC invested in them, and they were tiny and lasted a short time compared to HDDs, even in 2013. Around 2017/2018 SSDs really started to come way down in price and start to barely compare to the price of HDDs. It's only recently that even cheap laptops come out with SSDs by default, less than 10 years.
@@kamilciura7953 it’s funny you mention an SSD. Digital Foundry back in 2013 I believe published an article exploring the effects of putting one in PS3 and the findings were largely negligible. PS3 was architected in an era before SSD technology was being implemented in reasonable amounts and so while there were some improvements to responsiveness and loading it wasn’t enough to make much of a difference.
@@fellahuman I think Rage was one of the few games where an SSD solved a lot of the streaming issues. John Carmack did say that there was more than enough compute power on Cell to decompress the textures at far beyond what was needed - it was entirely a memory and disc bandwidth issues. Said it one the one area where Cell still had a performance advantage over more conventional processors for many years after release. But even by the time of Rage, they had GPU compute decompress.
Was there a reason you had the brightness almost maxed out on the 360? That might’ve been the reason why they looked so different with the pc version looking darker
Nah there is a stark contrast difference that varies by scene. Some scenes the Xbox version looks way darker, other scenes the pc version looks way darker.
@@WaveMaster1963 Only if they do it right so you can use the Gears 3 mutators on the whole trilogy, unified MP with every map and character, etc. Unlike Halo which insisted on individual engines making it a total clusterfuck not even offering the same skulls for every campaign.
If you disable SMOOTHFRAMERATE in the ini, open the exe in a hex editor and update the ini’s corresponding SHA-1 hex to match the modified version and then limit the frame rate to 59 in RTSS it seems to solves a lot of the stutter. But it’s an insane workaround
It's from an era where pc ports were extremely poor and an after thought. I'm glad steam caught on an publishers realised there's lots of money to be made.
God you just sent me back to why I have ALWAYS hated Unreal 3 games. Honestly the only reason some of this jank doesn't happen any more is solely because devs have slightly smartened up, but I remember still having to do this for some UE4 games. So annoying.
You can change the framerate and fix alot of the stutters using a program called XLIVELESSNESS. It allows you to edit the ini files without running into the c++ Error when trying to launch the game. Me and a friend did a co-op playthrough not long ago and I kept a consistent 144FPS
The 360 had 512 MB of unified memory, which was used for both the system and graphics. This small amount of memory limited how many high res textures could be loaded into VRAM simultaneously. To manage memory effectively, 360 developers often used texture streaming techniques. This involved loading lower-res textures initially and swapping them out for higher-resolution versions as needed. This approach helped keep the game running smoothly without pausing but resulted in noticeable texture pop-in. GTA IV on the Xbox 360 is a good example of slow texture streaming, leading to low res textures being displayed initially while higher-resolution textures loaded in the background.
Microsoft originally planned the xbox 360 with 256MBs of RAM, but Epic Games showed how Gears of War 1 looked with 256MBs which conviced Microsoft to increased it to 512MBs.
Go back home after school. It's friday. You have entire day to yourself. Your mom made some delicious food and dad brought you some extra snacks. You turn on your X360 and bam! Entire night of Gears of War! No pressure. No responsibilities. Just gaming. Goddamn I miss being a kid...
@@DJBVwe don’t need a “technical” jump like this to have fun. Also moores law is only theoretical and not to be taken seriously, big graphical jumps are always possible.
The transition in graphic quality between those two generations was truly something to behold at the time. I feel with current/next gen, moving away from HDD'S to SSD's is a great start for overall performance on games, but as for graphics, I think as long as 4k displays are still out of most people's budgets, console gamers won't really feel that same leap in quality that was felt at the time of 360 & ps3 releases; most people are still on 1080p which has been around for almost 2 decades. Also consoles would need to get to a point of running 4k games with 60fps consistently across different games to truly feel like next-gen, as that still proves to be a challenge.
I don't think we will ever see that jump again because we hit peak on graphical rendering during 360/PS3 era. Like games absolutely looks better now then they did during the era and they will look even better in 10 years. But everything that was lacking to make realistic looking environments came out during the 360/PS3 era and now it's just improving those textures and effects.
Really? I felt like the transition didn't feel that impressive at the time because so many games looked like Gears of War... completely devoid of any color except brown
Playing games like PDZ, Condemned, PGR3, Kameo, etc., at launch blew my mind, and then 2006 came and we got Gears of War, Oblivion, Prey, Dead Rising, Crackdown, etc., and then 2007 came and we got Mass Effect, Bioshock, The Darkness, Halo 3, etc. Such a great time to play video games.
We haven’t even seen anything that matches the graphics in gears 5 update and dlc they did . That was out of this world for Series X . Biggest jump I have seen this console generation so far above Xbox one x version.
I don't how much it would change the image, but John's brightness settings is close to max. It is shown at the beginning where they are comparing different settings between pc and the 360 versions. The game maybe would have looked darker and punchier on the 360 if he dialed it down to the default brightness settings.
Pretty sure they called it ‘Destroyed Beauty’. I still use my 360 pretty regularly but the game that floored me wasn’t gears it was Jericho and it’s character swapping mechanic that impressed me the most.
HAHA! I recently played the Gears Ultimate Edition so I was literally screaming "IT'S THRASHBALL" at you guys when you couldn't remember the name of the fictional sport!
@@OfficialiGamer And then it came out on PC in an awful state. And guess what? It *still* runs like trash! Even on my Ryzen 5 5600X with an RTX 3070 my frame rate always dips to the upper 40s in that last arena in this first level. Don't see any CPU bottlenecks, GPU is always well below 40%. I don't get it.
@@Smurfman256 I have an almost identical PC to yours (Ryzen 7-7700X instead), and while I haven’t gotten around to testing Ultimate Edition yet, I have been playing the older Gears games on Xenia, and I’ve been able to keep an almost locked 60 in both Gears 1 and 2 (just started Gears 3 today so haven’t been able to test it much). It’s kind of sad that you can get better performance out of an early-in-development emulator than you can out of an early Xbox One game…
@@5persondude you will be very perplexed and disappointed by the performance. And I don't know if it's because of legacy issues with Unreal Engine 3, but it runs significantly worse than Batman Arkham Knight despite being a significantly smaller game in scope. And I guarantee you that the performance issues in that game are because UE3 is being pushed to do things it really was not designed to do.
@@Smurfman256 It really is a terrible performer. I'm pretty sure I've gotten under 60fps on a 7800X3D and a 3080, which is insane. Also frame-rate lock on that game is broken. Windows Store games also don't appear on RTSS so I must put a global cap to play it at 120 "locked".
@@mjc0961 It's not terrible. I never understood that. Plays just like the other games. Story is as interesting as any of the others. Just because it's a standalone prequel, I guess? It's expansion Awakenings is great too.
Was the 360 version installed to HDD? If so that might have something to do with the weird texture streaming issue in that cutscene. Some older games get problems when they are installed since they were never made with that in mind.
12:51 is that really the default brightness setting on xbox? seems cranked up, and maybe pc needs brightness/gamma tweaked as well? Doesn't seem like a great comparison without adjusting the brightness/gamma first.
I never liked Gears... then I got my Series X and decided to try again, and a month later I'd finished 1-3 and have since played all but Judgement. Fell in love with it.
5 was great overall, but I really prefer Gears to more narrow in terms of level design... wide linear just felt off. I liked that they experimented, but hoping it's not a thing going forward.
Gears Tactics, all though plays significantly different, is an excellent xcom-like game that I'd highly recommend to any gears fans who haven't played it yet
It's been years but I remember installing the game on my HDD felt like it reduced the texture issues. It'd need more testing but that was my experience on the OG 360
The Xbox 360 in 2005 was so ahead of its time it was insane, my PC was built for running Warcraft 3 and could barely handle Half Life 2 at the lowest settings, so seeing Gears of War was mind blowing.
7:42 Is the game installed on your 360's hard drive? This was a game that came out well before HDD installation and wasn't really designed to take advantage of that. Some games do have issues like that if you install to HDD.
Oh I remember the good ole days” Console Master Race” days when PC was behind the consoles in games. Custom architecture and forward thinking features that PC eventually adopted and surpassed
I can play the 1st three games with backwards compatibility on series x but I would love to play the gears 2,3,judgment on PC. MS brought halo collection on pc I hope they bring Gears collection as whole
I don't think that'll happen, 343 refused to port Halo 5 because of difficulties, Sony did the same with the rest of the Uncharted games, etc. PS3 and 360 had weird PPC arquitectures and it's a pain to port a lot of exclusives from those consoles to PC.
It's that bad? I've played through half of it and didn't notice anything that weird with it? Actually, I think I kind of remember it didn't run amazing.
@@AJ-xv7oh After one of the Win10 updates the game started to randomly dropping frames to 10-15 fps region for absolutely no reason. That was like 4 or 5 years ago, it's still broken to this day on both 10 and 11.
Even though I think the gamma present is different on X360 and PC, the biggest difference was that John had a different brightness level. When he showed the color presents it was almost at 100% brightness.
Built my first gaming PC because Gears of War was coming to PC back in 2007. The E-Day trailer instantly brought me back to those times, incredibly nostalgic.
Gears PC port is so weird. 360 looks and runs so much better, only advantage to PC version is higher resolution textures and the bonus level. Almost wish they ran this on Series X with the higher resolution textures but the 360 version.
the stuttering is from sublevel streaming/loading, this also occurs on many other UE3 games, such as Mirror's edge at certain trigger volumes in the chapters you will always get a stutter.
Waiting for a Gears PC collection for 2, 3 and Judgment. I played these games for the first time in 2016 with my One S when I bought Gears 4. It had codes for the first four 360 games and it was one of the gnarliest packages ever. Gears 2 was my favorite of the series. I play Gears 2 on Xenia sometimes but I'd love a native PC port simply because I'd love to see an active multiplayer scene for the game.
Doubt that will ever happen, same with Fable 2, Lost Odyssey, and Blue Dragon. Ms don't care about what you actually want, they just want you buy their new stuff (most of which is trash)
There is a build of Gears of War 2 on PC floating around that is mostly functional. I did try playing through it but stopped at Landown because the game complained that the map was missing. Gears of War 3 on PC works surprisingly well though, look up "Gears 3 Jacinto" and have fun lol.
How did you guys not mess with brightness on either system to match? Its obvious to me its gamma/brightness slider on one or the other thats different.
That's because Microsoft at the time was trying to popularize Universal Windows Platform apps for Windows 10 (UWP), which, unlike traditional Win32 apps, were intended to run in a sandbox and to be installed from the Microsoft Store. The UWP technology turned out to be a failure, especially for video games. It did not use PC resources properly and the platform limited customization options and mods, among other things.
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Unreal baked lowest mips into seek free packages, then streamed higher mips whenever it could. 360 hdd fragmentation and how close to the center of the disc were both fairly random factors that determined when textures would stream in. Also, possibly original Gears was not built in linear color space, so the post processing effects had to be rebuilt for monitors which did not factor in the same gamma exponent as the game's console targets which would have had a different gamma exponent in the day due to the imprecision of early LCD and of course, CRTs.
Gears came out a year later, right when the Wii and PS3 launched. I remember staying home and playing it while my brother was out waiting in line for a Wii on launch night. It felt like a good answer to the new consoles coming out. The PS3 also launched with Resistance, which was also a good splitscreen co-op shooter.
12:50 may be a limited range V full range output or gamma output difference, odd as id expect the PC to have less contrast. It may be the Xbox was colour graded for CRT and PC for early low contrast CCFL displays? (CCFL was normal before LED displays)
Halo CE looked cool on a 3D TV on 360 but Avatar looked the best in 3D on 360. I wish we still had 3D TV options for games now. The darker PC version does make Gears scenery look like it has more depth though.
Just replayed GoW first time since it came out. It was both nostalgic and almost as if I was playing it for the first time. That was the peak era of gaming
Maybe you could do a live stream with Cliff Bleszinski. He was working on the game at the time and it would be interesting to hear from him what was the initial ideas for the game, problems during development, engine limitations, PC ports problems and so on... BTW, I just checked the game on my PC and vsync actually could be fixed by pressing the alt+enter keys twice. At least that was working in my case. Also, I notice that when I put post processing settings on low, the game is much brighter but unfortunately there is no bloom effect. So my solution for this problem is Display Color Enhancement option from AMD Adrenaline game panel and then set dynamic contrast option = 3.
The graphics on this game absolutely blew my mind back in the day. Stunning. And it didn't hurt that my hype started with one of the best game trailers of all time.
Could the stutters on PC be a streaming issue? Such features tend to be very deep down in the code so they perhaps opted not to remove it. Think highest end DDR5 is just barely able to reach the same transfer speeds as that thing and stuff must still be transferred over PCI-e to the gpu
Umm John that's not the default brightness setting on the 360. You have it cranked way up high and this is why there's a more different contrast between the two.
Quick question, guys: with these comparison videos with the old xbox 360 (that hurt to say, damn!😢😢) Do you just insert and play, or do you install on the hard drive then play? And if you do, what's the performance difference when doing so. Curiosity got the better me.
The PC Color problem is messed up gamma settings. Make screenshot on x360/pc splitscreen, apply 1.5 gamma correction to pc side and you will get the same contrast/saturation etc. as in x360 version.
They've probably played different difficulties. On Xbox 360 there is no 'normal' difficulty, it's either easy or hardcore. Normal was introduced in PC port
Vsync actually does work if you Alt-Tab out of the game. I even mentioned it in Gears of War PC Gaming Wiki page but it seems like most people still don't realize how important PCGW is to run older games on modern hardware with high resolutions, refresh rates, and corrected FOV for widescreens (and even ultrawides in some cases).
Was the PC version running the patches that were released? I had this game on PC using AMD CPU (don’t remember which one) and an AMD 1900 and the I don’t remember the stutter being nearly this bad. But, I also installed patches (I think there might have been 2 of them?). I think it was all related to GFWL sucking up resources in the background. It was still a bad port compared to the 360 version, but at least I remember it being way more playable.
It's amazing how much more naturalistic the 360 looks, in just the colors even. On PC it feels like you're almost getting black crush and everything is sort.of covered in a grey-yellow-green tint.
I am playing the game on a PC with Q6600 and 9800gtx+ and I don't have stutters and vsync works from the nvidia panel. And the brightness on the Xbox it's too high, that's why they look so different.
10:45 I think you're supposed to edit the INIs inside Documents\My Games\Gears of War for Windows\WarGame\Config rather than the ones in the game directory.
This was my 1st "next gen" experience of that era. I played it on pc and I absolutely LOVED the game. When gears 2 came out I waited 1 year for a pc port and ended up buying a 360 just for that game. Back then I thought it was quite clever of microsoft to do that in order to lure pc gamers to their console environment. When you come to think about it, bringing their intelectual properties to other machines is not only profitable in the short term, but also in a future where everything becomes a service. If you want to play these games, you have to subscribe to microsoft. But no one will be willing to do so if they don't get to actually experience these franchises.
Thanks for the effort of putting together that period correct PC build Alex, well done. Great comparison, very interesting how this worked out at the time, you'd expect more parity really. The brightness thing might have something to do with John having the brightness slighter maxed.
And after almost two decades, UE traversal stutter still hasn't been fixed.
What is that btw?
@@amgoingmad It's a micro stutter you feel when traversing the world. As you move through levels and new parts load, Unreal Engine always has a bottleneck where the game "stutters" noticeably due to the loading of new assets. It's kind of like how games stutter when you autosave/quicksave them.
Unreal 5 has a feature built in now to cache all the shaders so it has been fixed it's just whether the studio has enough QA to comb the game well enough to actually cache all of it.
@@AdiusOmega I'm not talking about shader stutter.
@@AdiusOmega False. It's a step in the right direction, but UE 5 still suffers from both shader stutter and traversal stutters.
The way Alex reacts to stutters is hilarious, it's like a Yu-Gi-Oh protagonist taking damage 😂😂😂😂😂
Lol it does sound like he is taking damage.
"UGGGGGHHHGHGGGGGGGGGGHHH"- Alex, 2024
"IT'S NO USE!"
Needs a life point counter going down with the bleepbleepbleep sound effect.
@@jackayers4955 You watched the latest episode of abridged?
Around this time, most consoles were still being played on CRT screens while 99% of PC players were on terrible looking LCD panels. Perhaps this is why they tweaked the post processing so much for the PC port. Crushing the contrast would’ve helped the look of it on those horribly low contrast early LCD panels.
It's crazy gamers ditched crts for that trash...
@@fvallo Not me lol. I got a 1080i Sony Trinitron that I kept up until just two years ago. You’d never know it was 1080i and not 1080p, especially because its native res was actually 1920x1080. Best deinterlacing of all time, looked beautiful on 720p too. But my god did 360 games look gorgeous on that thing. I even gamed on it up until like 2016. Destiny on PS4 was like a prerendered CG film on that TV.
@@fvallo Manufacturers stopped making them first and nobody wanted to stay on 15"-19" screens
I have a really nice 32 inch Panasonic Tau Giga 480p progressive scan TV I used with 360. It was amazing color. To be honest though a 65 inch OLED is great to use with 360 today anyway as it is for original Xbox too with a HDMI adapter.
@@itsd0nkThat would have been awesome
Did John not notice his brightness is set to its highest 😂
My first thought!
That's a Fantastic Take Away! Despite how Intelligent someone can be, They aren't immune from being Stupid.
It sucks that, that one simple variable is what caused us to have issues with the Presentation and their attempt of Comparison.
John may have had to turn his Brightness up so much because he is using a more modern display.
Those xbox 360 textures are brutal as well as those stutters at 7:40 or so... lol it just got better, your guys' absolute confusion at the slow texture loading was fantastic
It's weird that it happened that early. I remember issues like that happening more late game.
Maybe the aging hard drive or they are playing it from the disc?@@crazyjak56
None of us noticed! Are you a member of DF now!
The Xbox 360 didn't have HDD by default, so games have to stream textures and assets from DVD drive.
The color difference between Gears 1 on X360 and PC is that EPIC was using 24 bit color on X360 for some parts of lighting/color, that could fit on eSRAM.
PC has either 16 bit color (like in thr 90s) or 32 bit color. Problem is 24 bit color doesn't simply "fit" within a 32 bit buffer, 24 bit color is rounded up to 32 bit. So errors or deviations happened early on UE3' life.
The color precision difference of Xbox 360 is one of the major pain points of X360 emulator, Xenia.
John has the brightness cranked up though.
Oh wow. That's fascinating.
That's really confusing to me, most PC "32-bit" is R8G8B8X8 (eg 8 padding bits) or similar (with alpha or in BGR order) There are larger color spaces, like R10G10B10X2, but I think they came later.
In any case, while the precision difference would be a factor to getting reproducible post effects and the like, it wouldn't have this sort of effect on the whole scene brightness scale and tone.
@@SimonBuchanNz You seem right on that. There was the possibility of some differences when calculating various sharers but that was something to would have more been an issue on the Nvidia pipeline than the AMD. Particularly with the FX variable shader depth issues.
On Gears PC it looks like an artistic change rather than a technical.
I feel like some of the bloom/over saturation can be contributed to playing at full brightness on 360. It's not multiplayer, you can turn down the brightness a little
2:35 But your brightness is cranked up almost to the max. Of course the x360 version test appears to have more bloom and looks so much brighter. 😂
Exactly what I came here to point out
ain't that the default preset, tho? does the 360 version really just defaults to the max brightness?
@@Brunn0121 It absolutely doesn't. The default is exactly in the middle. Back in the day I would even darken a bit by two presses of d-pad to the left for better contrast on my monitor. That was the switch spot for me. lol
@@thiagovidal6137 doesn't the game ask you to tweak the brightness when you boot it up for the first time? IIRC, I played the games just like you, two DPad presses left of center.
@@halofreak1990 Don't remember if it does, but even if it did, the default would still be the middle. John definitely manually cranked that up. Maybe by accident. I'm surprised they spent so much time talking about the brightness different in confusion without noticing the x360 version was at high brightness settings.
John has the brightness cranked up in his game :(
Weird because he goes to video settings and you can see it right there and makes both versions look way different.
I really want this video done right :( I’m sorry!
You might have a point there
I NOTICED IT RIGHT AWAY TOO! It really bugged me more than it should hahaha
@@ChuckLopez same here it’s still bugging me. It ruins the video, maybe they can add the correct footage later? And note to ignore the comments about the contrast and the bloom etc.
also, the pc is from a year before the port and is not even high end.
Bespoke settings per se
Texture streaming issues were actually VERY common on X360 / PS3. It stood out to me like crazy compared to most PC games.
Flashbacks to waiting an hour for Rage to install on PS3 and still having horrendous streaming issues
Yes, especially UE3 games had those.
On Xbox 360 there were developers who made a good use of streaming from both DVD and HDD, saturating the bandwidth. In fact, when X360 firmware allowed to install all game data to HDD, this functionality ruined some. For example, Halo 3. But later on, BF3 also put that dual streaming method to good use and installing a whole game made it look and run worse 😂
I've recently duested off my PS3 "Super slim" and started to collect a games for it. Back in the day, there were many people which I've bought digitally. I've put a SATA SSD to see if it will make a noticeable difference in titles which had pop-in issues and while these are not completely gone in all games, they are less pronounced. And in titles where these issues weren't that big if a problem in the first place, it removes them completely. I've played through Doom 3 BFG edition and saw no single instance of texture being late to load.
Which suggests that bandwidth to move the data was there all the time, but HDD was holding hardware back from achieving full potential. Oh, load times are much better too.
In a hindsight, this made me realise how Sony and MS cheaper out on PS4 and Xbox One. If they couldn't make SSD feasible fit into spec at targeted price, they should at least go for 7200 rpm HDD, preferably hybrid one with like 4 GB of flash cache. I used one of those in PC back in the day, not as good as SSD, but notable jump in quality of experience over lousy 5400 rpm.
@@kamilciura7953When Xbox one and PS4 came out, SSDs were still very expensive, only some enthusiasts on PC invested in them, and they were tiny and lasted a short time compared to HDDs, even in 2013.
Around 2017/2018 SSDs really started to come way down in price and start to barely compare to the price of HDDs. It's only recently that even cheap laptops come out with SSDs by default, less than 10 years.
@@kamilciura7953 it’s funny you mention an SSD. Digital Foundry back in 2013 I believe published an article exploring the effects of putting one in PS3 and the findings were largely negligible. PS3 was architected in an era before SSD technology was being implemented in reasonable amounts and so while there were some improvements to responsiveness and loading it wasn’t enough to make much of a difference.
@@fellahuman I think Rage was one of the few games where an SSD solved a lot of the streaming issues. John Carmack did say that there was more than enough compute power on Cell to decompress the textures at far beyond what was needed - it was entirely a memory and disc bandwidth issues. Said it one the one area where Cell still had a performance advantage over more conventional processors for many years after release. But even by the time of Rage, they had GPU compute decompress.
Was there a reason you had the brightness almost maxed out on the 360? That might’ve been the reason why they looked so different with the pc version looking darker
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing
Nah there is a stark contrast difference that varies by scene. Some scenes the Xbox version looks way darker, other scenes the pc version looks way darker.
The whole gears franchise needs to be on PC & Steam.
Word. A halo mic collection-style for gears games would be great
So gears ultimate edition and gears 4 is on the Microsoft store and still not on steam!!! WTF??!!
@@WaveMaster1963 Only if they do it right so you can use the Gears 3 mutators on the whole trilogy, unified MP with every map and character, etc. Unlike Halo which insisted on individual engines making it a total clusterfuck not even offering the same skulls for every campaign.
agreed not having 2, 3 and judgment is a literal shame
@@davidbeyerle6996 4 & 5 are on Steam
There is big difference between GTA IV on xbox 360 and PC check it out guys
If you disable SMOOTHFRAMERATE in the ini, open the exe in a hex editor and update the ini’s corresponding SHA-1 hex to match the modified version and then limit the frame rate to 59 in RTSS it seems to solves a lot of the stutter. But it’s an insane workaround
It's from an era where pc ports were extremely poor and an after thought. I'm glad steam caught on an publishers realised there's lots of money to be made.
God you just sent me back to why I have ALWAYS hated Unreal 3 games. Honestly the only reason some of this jank doesn't happen any more is solely because devs have slightly smartened up, but I remember still having to do this for some UE4 games. So annoying.
You can change the framerate and fix alot of the stutters using a program called XLIVELESSNESS. It allows you to edit the ini files without running into the c++ Error when trying to launch the game. Me and a friend did a co-op playthrough not long ago and I kept a consistent 144FPS
The 360 had 512 MB of unified memory, which was used for both the system and graphics. This small amount of memory limited how many high res textures could be loaded into VRAM simultaneously. To manage memory effectively, 360 developers often used texture streaming techniques. This involved loading lower-res textures initially and swapping them out for higher-resolution versions as needed. This approach helped keep the game running smoothly without pausing but resulted in noticeable texture pop-in. GTA IV on the Xbox 360 is a good example of slow texture streaming, leading to low res textures being displayed initially while higher-resolution textures loaded in the background.
Microsoft originally planned the xbox 360 with 256MBs of RAM, but Epic Games showed how Gears of War 1 looked with 256MBs which conviced Microsoft to increased it to 512MBs.
Go back home after school. It's friday. You have entire day to yourself.
Your mom made some delicious food and dad brought you some extra snacks.
You turn on your X360 and bam! Entire night of Gears of War!
No pressure. No responsibilities. Just gaming.
Goddamn I miss being a kid...
Well keep dreaming, moore's law is dead this jump wont happen anymore.
you don't miss being a kid, you miss not having every second of your life consumed by having to earn income at a job just to survive.
@@kayvahn2141 ...Yeah Sherlock... THAT'S what I miss about being a kid...
I forever reminsce of those days where my friends would come over and dominate the Annex gametype playlist. THIS IS ANNEX!!!
@@DJBVwe don’t need a “technical” jump like this to have fun. Also moores law is only theoretical and not to be taken seriously, big graphical jumps are always possible.
Texture streaming aside, The jump in leap from PS2-PS3 and OG Xbox to 360 is the kinda of next gen i wanted to see from PS4-PS5/XBOX one-Series X.
The transition in graphic quality between those two generations was truly something to behold at the time. I feel with current/next gen, moving away from HDD'S to SSD's is a great start for overall performance on games, but as for graphics, I think as long as 4k displays are still out of most people's budgets, console gamers won't really feel that same leap in quality that was felt at the time of 360 & ps3 releases; most people are still on 1080p which has been around for almost 2 decades. Also consoles would need to get to a point of running 4k games with 60fps consistently across different games to truly feel like next-gen, as that still proves to be a challenge.
I don't think we will ever see that jump again because we hit peak on graphical rendering during 360/PS3 era. Like games absolutely looks better now then they did during the era and they will look even better in 10 years. But everything that was lacking to make realistic looking environments came out during the 360/PS3 era and now it's just improving those textures and effects.
Really? I felt like the transition didn't feel that impressive at the time because so many games looked like Gears of War... completely devoid of any color except brown
Playing games like PDZ, Condemned, PGR3, Kameo, etc., at launch blew my mind, and then 2006 came and we got Gears of War, Oblivion, Prey, Dead Rising, Crackdown, etc., and then 2007 came and we got Mass Effect, Bioshock, The Darkness, Halo 3, etc. Such a great time to play video games.
We haven’t even seen anything that matches the graphics in gears 5 update and dlc they did . That was out of this world for Series X . Biggest jump I have seen this console generation so far above Xbox one x version.
I don't how much it would change the image, but John's brightness settings is close to max. It is shown at the beginning where they are comparing different settings between pc and the 360 versions. The game maybe would have looked darker and punchier on the 360 if he dialed it down to the default brightness settings.
It looks way too high
@@DuckAlertBeats I know right. Hope they take issue and make a quick comparison
Pretty sure they called it ‘Destroyed Beauty’. I still use my 360 pretty regularly but the game that floored me wasn’t gears it was Jericho and it’s character swapping mechanic that impressed me the most.
I still prefer the OG release to Ultimate. The 7th gen graphics have their own charm in a way.
Yes make everything shiny and wax looking 😂
So do I. Ultimate kind of feels like the Halo CE remaster, where they just shoved in a bunch of higher-res assets and called it a day.
HAHA! I recently played the Gears Ultimate Edition so I was literally screaming "IT'S THRASHBALL" at you guys when you couldn't remember the name of the fictional sport!
I remember when the Ultimate Edition was ONLY xb1
@@OfficialiGamer And then it came out on PC in an awful state.
And guess what? It *still* runs like trash! Even on my Ryzen 5 5600X with an RTX 3070 my frame rate always dips to the upper 40s in that last arena in this first level. Don't see any CPU bottlenecks, GPU is always well below 40%. I don't get it.
@@Smurfman256 I have an almost identical PC to yours (Ryzen 7-7700X instead), and while I haven’t gotten around to testing Ultimate Edition yet, I have been playing the older Gears games on Xenia, and I’ve been able to keep an almost locked 60 in both Gears 1 and 2 (just started Gears 3 today so haven’t been able to test it much).
It’s kind of sad that you can get better performance out of an early-in-development emulator than you can out of an early Xbox One game…
@@5persondude you will be very perplexed and disappointed by the performance. And I don't know if it's because of legacy issues with Unreal Engine 3, but it runs significantly worse than Batman Arkham Knight despite being a significantly smaller game in scope. And I guarantee you that the performance issues in that game are because UE3 is being pushed to do things it really was not designed to do.
@@Smurfman256 It really is a terrible performer. I'm pretty sure I've gotten under 60fps on a 7800X3D and a 3080, which is insane. Also frame-rate lock on that game is broken. Windows Store games also don't appear on RTSS so I must put a global cap to play it at 120 "locked".
The difference in contrast could do with the 360 being at nearly full brightness.
Technically Gears Judgement is closer to E-Day
Yes, I was going to say this. It's a good game. GOW2 is my favorite though.
Gears Judgment was terrible and we don't acknowledge it
@@mjc0961 I’m going to go play it now in your honor
Man campaign and overrun were fun. Regular MP was not. @@mjc0961
@@mjc0961 It's not terrible. I never understood that. Plays just like the other games. Story is as interesting as any of the others. Just because it's a standalone prequel, I guess? It's expansion Awakenings is great too.
Stutter Struggle - Emergence Day
Just two dudebros, yapping about the Thrashy-B, shootin' their Troiks, checking out the tilework.
Was the 360 version installed to HDD? If so that might have something to do with the weird texture streaming issue in that cutscene. Some older games get problems when they are installed since they were never made with that in mind.
12:51 is that really the default brightness setting on xbox? seems cranked up, and maybe pc needs brightness/gamma tweaked as well? Doesn't seem like a great comparison without adjusting the brightness/gamma first.
36:20 YES! Splinter Cell's lighting is crazy good I would love for you to explore it in a video.
I never liked Gears... then I got my Series X and decided to try again, and a month later I'd finished 1-3 and have since played all but Judgement.
Fell in love with it.
Judgement is just a horde mode game with some story. No need to play it.
Yeah was a very intentional skip, ha... but while awaiting more Gears I did almost fire it up.
5 was great overall, but I really prefer Gears to more narrow in terms of level design... wide linear just felt off.
I liked that they experimented, but hoping it's not a thing going forward.
Gears Tactics, all though plays significantly different, is an excellent xcom-like game that I'd highly recommend to any gears fans who haven't played it yet
Oh I'll totally hit up Tactics one day!!
12:42 John's brightness seems to be turned way up?
Thanks for validating years later that it was not an issue with my rig from 2008
17:00 🎼"every little step you take, stutters will be there"🎶 😂
Gears of War on PC is very contrasty which kinda gives it the Victorian goth vibes.
Looks much better imo
The 360 version is algo dark, this is not the default brightness. It was an oversight
It's been years but I remember installing the game on my HDD felt like it reduced the texture issues. It'd need more testing but that was my experience on the OG 360
I was just about to say the same
Yes it's better when installed on the hdd, and if you play on Xbox One/Series the issue is completely gone
I vaguely remember this for some reason too.
The Xbox 360 in 2005 was so ahead of its time it was insane, my PC was built for running Warcraft 3 and could barely handle Half Life 2 at the lowest settings, so seeing Gears of War was mind blowing.
It seems that John had the brightness almost maxed out. What brightness setting did you have Alex?
Default Post install n the middle
I definitely remember Gears 1 had that pop in during in game and the cinematics lol. The Immulsion Factory underground with the Therons come to mind.
Thank you for yet another trip down memory lane. I absolutely enjoyed that video as I did adore Gears of War. The outro was straight up 🔥
7:42 Is the game installed on your 360's hard drive? This was a game that came out well before HDD installation and wasn't really designed to take advantage of that. Some games do have issues like that if you install to HDD.
Please do Oblivion next! Almost nobody has addressed how the PC version of that game also fails to do HDR/bloom the same as the Xbox version
Why is John’s brightness setting nearly all the way up?
This is what I'm wondering!
This ruins the comparison for me.
I play the OG GoW to this day on my ROG Ally. It runs beautifully using only 10w.
Amazing game for quick plays.
Oh I remember the good ole days” Console Master Race” days when PC was behind the consoles in games. Custom architecture and forward thinking features that PC eventually adopted and surpassed
Yeah, this lasted only a few years though, but yeah.
iirc, the 360 was untouched for a good 6 months, maybe 8.
I love when Alex brings up an interesting fact and Jon is like 'wait don't touch the controller' and 'go over there' and fully ignores it :D
I can play the 1st three games with backwards compatibility on series x but I would love to play the gears 2,3,judgment on PC. MS brought halo collection on pc I hope they bring Gears collection as whole
I don't think that'll happen, 343 refused to port Halo 5 because of difficulties, Sony did the same with the rest of the Uncharted games, etc. PS3 and 360 had weird PPC arquitectures and it's a pain to port a lot of exclusives from those consoles to PC.
You guys should cover the still completely broken ultimate edition of Gears of War on PC
It's that bad? I've played through half of it and didn't notice anything that weird with it? Actually, I think I kind of remember it didn't run amazing.
Hmm I don't remember anything being wrong with it
@@AJ-xv7oh After one of the Win10 updates the game started to randomly dropping frames to 10-15 fps region for absolutely no reason. That was like 4 or 5 years ago, it's still broken to this day on both 10 and 11.
Works fine
I don't remember having any problems with it, but I did play it years after release so maybe I was just able to brute force it with better hardware.
49:25 The awkward silence following Alex's death sounds was beautiful 😂😂
Even though I think the gamma present is different on X360 and PC, the biggest difference was that John had a different brightness level.
When he showed the color presents it was almost at 100% brightness.
Built my first gaming PC because Gears of War was coming to PC back in 2007. The E-Day trailer instantly brought me back to those times, incredibly nostalgic.
Gears PC port is so weird. 360 looks and runs so much better, only advantage to PC version is higher resolution textures and the bonus level.
Almost wish they ran this on Series X with the higher resolution textures but the 360 version.
the stuttering is from sublevel streaming/loading, this also occurs on many other UE3 games, such as Mirror's edge at certain trigger volumes in the chapters you will always get a stutter.
Good ol' Lt Kim. He's got the codes. Doesn't always have the textures though. 😂
Waiting for a Gears PC collection for 2, 3 and Judgment. I played these games for the first time in 2016 with my One S when I bought Gears 4. It had codes for the first four 360 games and it was one of the gnarliest packages ever.
Gears 2 was my favorite of the series.
I play Gears 2 on Xenia sometimes but I'd love a native PC port simply because I'd love to see an active multiplayer scene for the game.
Same, I was hoping for a collection announcement more than a new game announcement.
Doubt that will ever happen, same with Fable 2, Lost Odyssey, and Blue Dragon. Ms don't care about what you actually want, they just want you buy their new stuff (most of which is trash)
There is a build of Gears of War 2 on PC floating around that is mostly functional. I did try playing through it but stopped at Landown because the game complained that the map was missing. Gears of War 3 on PC works surprisingly well though, look up "Gears 3 Jacinto" and have fun lol.
Gears 2 is so good.
1 word: Emulator.
2:33 John you have brightness cranked up all the way to the highest setting on the 360. Of course it’s going to look different, especially the bloom.
Think you could turn the brightness up any higher on the 360 side? It's not washed out enough :)
How did you guys not mess with brightness on either system to match? Its obvious to me its gamma/brightness slider on one or the other thats different.
Gears Ultimate Edition had a lot of issues on PC, but 4 and 5 were optimized really well. They both look and run great.
That's because Microsoft at the time was trying to popularize Universal Windows Platform apps for Windows 10 (UWP), which, unlike traditional Win32 apps, were intended to run in a sandbox and to be installed from the Microsoft Store. The UWP technology turned out to be a failure, especially for video games. It did not use PC resources properly and the platform limited customization options and mods, among other things.
Unreal baked lowest mips into seek free packages, then streamed higher mips whenever it could. 360 hdd fragmentation and how close to the center of the disc were both fairly random factors that determined when textures would stream in. Also, possibly original Gears was not built in linear color space, so the post processing effects had to be rebuilt for monitors which did not factor in the same gamma exponent as the game's console targets which would have had a different gamma exponent in the day due to the imprecision of early LCD and of course, CRTs.
Honestly having this day one on 360 was revolutionary and def blowing our minds. it was totally one of those monumental moments in gaming.
Actually, Gears 1 came out in late 2006. The 2005 X360 launch shooter was Call of Duty 2. And Perfect Dark Zero.
Probably the best day of my gaming life. This game was absolutely wild in 2006.
Gears came out a year later, right when the Wii and PS3 launched. I remember staying home and playing it while my brother was out waiting in line for a Wii on launch night. It felt like a good answer to the new consoles coming out. The PS3 also launched with Resistance, which was also a good splitscreen co-op shooter.
12:50 may be a limited range V full range output or gamma output difference, odd as id expect the PC to have less contrast. It may be the Xbox was colour graded for CRT and PC for early low contrast CCFL displays? (CCFL was normal before LED displays)
They need to bring this to Steam
Black level is crushed on the PC version. Definitely a gamma curve issue
As someone else suggested, they probably tuned for CRT TVs on XBox but LCD monitors on PC.
The 360 game is also pretty dark, that is not the default brightness
@@ChuckLopez yup, just booted gears 1 up on my 360, and john is missing a ton of shadows, texture streaming issues, color and brightness issues.
growing up in the PS2, 360 era it's crazy seeing these kinds of videos and understanding how game technology works
Sigh
I hate to be that guy but Gears Tactics and Judgment are closer to E day
Halo CE looked cool on a 3D TV on 360 but Avatar looked the best in 3D on 360. I wish we still had 3D TV options for games now.
The darker PC version does make Gears scenery look like it has more depth though.
18 years game, insane.
Could you not 😢
So hard to believe it's been that long! Life was better back then imo.
Just replayed GoW first time since it came out. It was both nostalgic and almost as if I was playing it for the first time. That was the peak era of gaming
I never played the game, but its commercial was special. To this day , i cant watch it without tearing up. Takes me back to a special time
Thanks, sad bot.
The best thing about GOW1 is the horror elements and innovative gameplay.
There is something wrong with the gama on the pc port, everything is too dark
Maybe you could do a live stream with Cliff Bleszinski. He was working on the game at the time and it would be interesting to hear from him what was the initial ideas for the game, problems during development, engine limitations, PC ports problems and so on... BTW, I just checked the game on my PC and vsync actually could be fixed by pressing the alt+enter keys twice. At least that was working in my case. Also, I notice that when I put post processing settings on low, the game is much brighter but unfortunately there is no bloom effect. So my solution for this problem is Display Color Enhancement option from AMD Adrenaline game panel and then set dynamic contrast option = 3.
Every single time you guys said "troika" all I could think about is how much I miss Troika Games 😢😢😢
The graphics on this game absolutely blew my mind back in the day. Stunning. And it didn't hurt that my hype started with one of the best game trailers of all time.
Could the stutters on PC be a streaming issue? Such features tend to be very deep down in the code so they perhaps opted not to remove it.
Think highest end DDR5 is just barely able to reach the same transfer speeds as that thing and stuff must still be transferred over PCI-e to the gpu
Early 360 era was rough for PC only gamers.
Umm John that's not the default brightness setting on the 360. You have it cranked way up high and this is why there's a more different contrast between the two.
Alex, your best outro. Period. Thanks!
I remember the texture steaming issue occurring on 360 back in the day.
You guys had fun, it showed. Great video you two
Gears was the only game I owned on Xbox 360 for awhile, so I played it over a dozen times on 360. The texture pop-in is exactly like I remember.
Quick question, guys: with these comparison videos with the old xbox 360 (that hurt to say, damn!😢😢) Do you just insert and play, or do you install on the hard drive then play?
And if you do, what's the performance difference when doing so. Curiosity got the better me.
The PC Color problem is messed up gamma settings. Make screenshot on x360/pc splitscreen, apply 1.5 gamma correction to pc side and you will get the same contrast/saturation etc. as in x360 version.
I hope some day you export these comparison videos to an ultra-wide aspect ratio so we can see both sides in full frame.
Hmmm, I kinda Like this idea
Bruhh!! John getting casually killed multiple times while Alex is stuttering and still not 1 death😂😂
They've probably played different difficulties. On Xbox 360 there is no 'normal' difficulty, it's either easy or hardcore. Normal was introduced in PC port
Vsync actually does work if you Alt-Tab out of the game.
I even mentioned it in Gears of War PC Gaming Wiki page but it seems like most people still don't realize how important PCGW is to run older games on modern hardware with high resolutions, refresh rates, and corrected FOV for widescreens (and even ultrawides in some cases).
Was the PC version running the patches that were released?
I had this game on PC using AMD CPU (don’t remember which one) and an AMD 1900 and the I don’t remember the stutter being nearly this bad.
But, I also installed patches (I think there might have been 2 of them?). I think it was all related to GFWL sucking up resources in the background.
It was still a bad port compared to the 360 version, but at least I remember it being way more playable.
Need someone to make a supercut of Alex’s stutter groans
It's amazing how much more naturalistic the 360 looks, in just the colors even. On PC it feels like you're almost getting black crush and everything is sort.of covered in a grey-yellow-green tint.
whats alex doing at 16:59
Bustin a 🥜
Didn’t compare the series x boosted version?
I am playing the game on a PC with Q6600 and 9800gtx+ and I don't have stutters and vsync works from the nvidia panel. And the brightness on the Xbox it's too high, that's why they look so different.
10:45 I think you're supposed to edit the INIs inside Documents\My Games\Gears of War for Windows\WarGame\Config rather than the ones in the game directory.
back when gaming was amazing. AMAZING. You had to be there.
I always thought it looked monochrome and weird even at the time honestly but I prefer GameCube and Dreamcast type colours in games lol
Always love these PC Time Capsule videos, keep the good work up!
Where is GOW on PC (Steam, Epic Store, etc.) ?
THAT'S CRAZY I JUST STARTED THE GEARS OF WAR FRANCHISE ALL OVER AGAIN... TURN IT UP MY MEMORIES
Love these Alex & John time capsules.
This was my 1st "next gen" experience of that era. I played it on pc and I absolutely LOVED the game. When gears 2 came out I waited 1 year for a pc port and ended up buying a 360 just for that game. Back then I thought it was quite clever of microsoft to do that in order to lure pc gamers to their console environment. When you come to think about it, bringing their intelectual properties to other machines is not only profitable in the short term, but also in a future where everything becomes a service. If you want to play these games, you have to subscribe to microsoft. But no one will be willing to do so if they don't get to actually experience these franchises.
Thanks for the effort of putting together that period correct PC build Alex, well done.
Great comparison, very interesting how this worked out at the time, you'd expect more parity really.
The brightness thing might have something to do with John having the brightness slighter maxed.
Gears of War, John, Alex, Xbox 360, bespoke. Can't really start out a Saturday morning after a long work week any better!