While the latest Gears of War games are now coming out on the PC, the first parts of the franchise never got released on the PC. Well, apart from the first game. PC gamers never got a chance to play Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3 or Gears of War Judgement. However, that’s about to change as all of these games are fully playable on the Xbox 360 emulator, Xenia.
From what we know so far, Microsoft does not plan to release any remakes of these GOW games. As such, PC gamers can only experience them via the Xenia emulator. Naturally, you’ll also need an X360 gamepad as there aren’t any K&M on-screen prompts.
YouTube’s ‘Andrew Russell’ has showcased Gears of War 3 and Gears of War: Judgement running on the latest version of Xenia Canary. In case you are wondering, Xenia Canary is the experimental version of Xenia.
The latest version of Xenia Canary has fixed numerous bugs and graphical glitches. Moreover, it’s now possible to play, from start to finish, both Gears of War 3 and Gears of War Judgement.
Unfortunately, though, the emulator runs these games at their original speed (30fps). Contrary to what we’ve seen with RPCS3, there isn’t currently any patch that can unlock their framerates. So yeah, it may take a while until we can fully enjoy them. I mean, you can fully play them now, however, both of them will look and feel even better at 60fps. Let’s just hope that this will be possible via a 60fps patch.
You can download the latest version of Xenia Canary from here.
Enjoy the following video and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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How about Gears 2?Is it playable?Also, is easy to run in 4K in this emulator?
No and no, Gears 2 has a shading problem when emulated for now, and this emulator has a problem with the majority of games when you manually tweak resolution
Technically it is playable from start to finish, and while there is a shading problem, it does have less stutter than GoW 3
720p + Shading problem + stutters isn’t what i call playable lol, better get a used 360 or a Xbone if you really want to play it or wait for the emulation to be better
Fully playable, game can be completed, but you do need something like a OC’d Vega56/1070 or better to get playable fps.
That’s at 720p30 (I recommend unlocking the fps, experience is more pleasant)
Games only run in either 720p or 1440p. But performance is nowhere good enough to push 2K in the emulator at the moment.
The game ran fine on my old I7 3770 processor, only issue was the ocasional stutter, some rare instances of scenarios dropping fps.
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Nothing new here John, no new thread about it in the Xenia subreddit, It plays the same way as before, 30 fps, 720p with a lot of stutters when compiling shaders, meaning that anything new that appears ingame will make it stutter like azz the first time (No way yet to download precompiled shaders like in CEMU) i just checked and the saving problem is still here, it only saves chapters not checkpoints, this video is absolutely misleading as there is nothing new to see here
“it’s now possible to play, from start to finish”
No word on it on the Canary Github page or the Xenia Subreddit yet, there’s no confirmation by people who completed it
“Let’s just hope that this will be possible via a 60fps patch”
Almost every new build of Xenia or Canary gets a custom build that unlocks the framerate, you can actually play GoW3 at 60 fps, but it’s still unplayable because it’s a stuttering mess
I experienced zero stutters on 5700 XT (without using ROV). Performance varied widely, but it never stuttered once.
Completed Gears 2 and 3 and playing through Judgement at the moment. Saves work perfectly fine (on the Canary build of course)
5GHZ 8600k here + GTX 1080, i’m having a lot of stutters when i first play a level, it gets better on a second playthrough once the shaders are compiled but still not perfect, is there something you do for that ?
5700 XT at 2 GHz, stock R5 3600. Performance degrades after playing a new level for a few minutes, you literally have to restart the emulator for the performance to shoot back up every now and then. But stutters? I haven’t experienced any. Do you use ROV?
It’s on by default on newest builds with new GPUs, so i guess it’s On
Can’t remember now if it’s on defaults really. I just know it tanks performance on AMD GPUs and Nvidia owners have the emulator crash on them
There are still some rendering errors with Gears 2, 3 and Judgement, howeveger the games are 95-99% rendering just fine.
“Unfortunately, though, the emulator runs these games at their original speed (30fps). Contrary to what we’ve seen with RPCS3, there isn’t currently any patch that can unlock their framerates.”
Incorrect. You can disable Vsync in the emulator and the games will run as fast as A) you PC can push under that scene particular conditions and B) up until engine frame limiter if there is one.
Gears games, like Unreal 3 games back in the day, have a fps limit of 62, even when emulated.
Yeah but what about “FPS tied to game mechanics”? Does this game have these issues?
No.
Nope for the Gears games.
Guys I’d recommend googling other videos of the emulator, there are a lot of games that can run at 60fps at 2k res.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rCi3wz9hPM
Cool how about just porting them.
gamecube and ps3 emulators are great, but ps2 has too many glitches so not a single game is fully playable