Gears of War Ultimate Native 4K Back-Compat Footage (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Rich here. Something that's come up a few times concerns a demo John and I saw at the Xbox Series X reveal event last year. Rather than showing us FPS Boost (2x frame-rate), Microsoft gave us a look at Gears of War Ultimate running at native 4K on Series X - a game that never received a One X upgrade, effectively locking it to 1080p30 on all retail Xbox machines. Alongside it, we saw One S running the game at its stock settings.

We did show some footage of this working in the specs reveal but today I thought I'd share more of the archive off-screen footage we have. This happened on Day Two of the event. John and I both took our Panasonic GH5 cameras for this and we set up one camera in a stationery position, filming both screens, while John shot on the second camera, with handheld shots.

I've used both of those shots to put together this short video showing everything of interest. To begin with, the MS staff did a pretty good job of synchronising the feeds, but when the player died on Series X, the sync was lost. From that point on, I just stuck to the view of John's camera which focused exclusively on the Series X screen. You get some debug HUD action too, which is always interesting! 

It'll be interesting to see whether this tech is ever deployed - obviously, we like to see more resolution *and* 2x frame-rate, right? But failing that, a choice between the two would be nice...

Download linkage here: https://digitalfoundry.net/2021-07-09-gears-of-war-ultimate-4k-series-x-enhanced-back-compat-extended-edit