Gears Of War 4, the soon to release new entry of the series developed by The Coalition, is going to look nice on Xbox One, but there's no doubt that the PC version will be superior in every possible way thanks to 4K support, better frame rate and more. Players will obviously require a very powerful machine to run the game at Ultra settings, but it seems like there are settings above Ultra which are meant to make the game scalable with new hardware.

　　In a new Gears Of War 4 preview by Ars Technica, it's been confirmed that the PC version of the game will come with Insane settings, and the PC used for the preview, which sported a GTX 1080 graphics card, an i7 processor and 32GB of DDR4 RAM, didn't manage to run the game properly at these settings. According to Technical Director Mike Raynor, these settings are offered for future systems, ensuring scalability with new hardware.

　　The game will scale with new hardware that will come out. You need a really high spec to get in there. It looks awesome, but it's very GPU-hungry.

　　There'll be a substantial performance boost for those who have a multi-GPU setup (SLI or CrossFire), which is great news. Mike Raynor also talked about how the team took advantage of DX12 for the development of the game, with the API allowing the team to have more direct control over what the GPU is doing.

　　DirectX 12 is a big part of how we're able to get additional performance out of the PC. The DX12 graphics API takes away a bunch of layers from the developer and hardware. It's letting us have more direct control over what the GPU's doing... We've completely parallelized the rendering system, meaning we're utilizing and running more CPU cores. One big focus we had was to lower the simulation cost to give headroom for the GPU. A lot of games out there have monster GPU but get framelocked because you're CPU bound. There's a huge upper range we support with what we've done.

　　Lastly, Ars Technica also revealed most of the graphics settings that will be available in the PC version of Gears of War 4. It's also been mentioned that there's a separate menu for "Real-time cinematics settings".

　　Dynamic resolution scaling (turn on/off, pick a percentage)

　　Enable async compute

　　Enable tiled resources

　　Lock/unlock frame limit

　　Disable vsync

　　Field of view

　　Display performance stats

　　Character texture detail

　　World texture detail

　　Effects texture detail

　　Lighting texture detail

　　Texture filtering (up to 16x anisotropic)

　　Anti-aliasing quality

　　Temporal AA sharpening

　　Foliage draw distance

　　World level of detail

　　Character level of detail

　　Motion blur quality

　　Motion blur intensity

　　Light shaft quality

　　Light scattering quality

　　Lens flare quality

　　Bloom quality

　　Shadow quality

　　Capsule shadow quality

　　Screen space shadow quality

　　Ambient occlusion quality

　　Ambient occlusion intensity

　　Post process quality

　　Screen space reflections

　　Enable environment reflections

　　Enable refractions

　　Particle spawn rate

　　Sharpening

　　Gears of War 4 launches on PC and Xbox One next month, check out the launch trailer here. It will have split-screen coop on PC as well as LAN support.