So, I’ve been wanting to replay the whole series for a while, and I wanted to start with Gears 1 Ultimate Edition on Windows 10. I bought the game at the end of last year from the Microsoft Store and was met with unacceptable performance, dropping fps to the 30s in some places on a GTX 1080 ti and an i7 4770K, running everything at max at 1440p. I read on the PCgamingwiki that there is a known issue with the game on windows 10 update 1809 and above, after which it started running poorly.
I finally decided to make a new hard drive partition and install Windows 10 1709. To my surprise, windows self-activated, apparently because it recognized my hardware, and no license was needed. I blocked all updates and downloaded Gears on the Microsoft Store.
As it turns out, it does indeed run better that my main windows partition, but the difference was not as great as I thought it would be. In the places it could drop to 35 fps, for instance, now runs at 55, as an example. It is still not ideal, as I wanted to run the game at 120+ fps. So, for the sake of consistency, I just capped the game at 60 fps, and with gsync, it plays well enough.
Shadows are the main culprit for the performance drops, running the game on both windows versions, but even with shadows at low, which essentially turns the shadows off on characters, enemies, and on some geometry, it does not run consistently at very high framerates.
Just wanted to let you guys know. Cheers!