I don’t know about that. I have a video of benchmarks with both Gears 4 and 5 maxed out at 5120x1440 and seem to do really well. Halo Infinite does very poor in campaign maxed out at 5120x1440. Gears 4 averaged 125fps and Gears 5 averaged 71fps. While in multiplayer, they both average a lot more and their built in benchmarks are worse case scenario…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDVzNrMHqi8
Infinite runs ~10-25% better than Gears 5 does, for me anyway. I run no VRS or res modifiers in either, both have DRS kick in below 60. Gears 5, benchmark and gameplay, I sit around 70, occasionally hitting 80ish at 3840x1600. Infinite I’m between 78 and 90 outside, locked 120 in the indoor sections. Both absolutely maxed. Biggest hit for Gears is the SSGI ray count, followed by some of the “insane” settings. TC intended the SSGI settings to be turned on in conjunction with VRS I’m sure, but I’m all about fidelity so long as I’m not dipping below 60FPS, and so I don’t run VRS due to the mild artifacting it introduces. It’s something I’m annoyed by, like TAA artifacts in pretty much every game that runs TAA (though props to Playground, the experimental TAA in Forza isn’t bad, very few TAA artifacts that I’ve noticed).
But to be fair, Gears has a lot more going for it in the graphics department. Halo Infinite sits between a AAA game and an eSports game graphic wise. Gears is also 3rd person, so your characters LOD and interactions is also at play and taxing FPS.
If I remember right, Halo Infinite in campaign ran over 120fps maxed out at 100% resolution scale in the beginning inside but once out in the open world, it taxed big time.
I think they employ actually roughly the same graphical feature set (though how well each feature is applied artistically is totally going to draw differences, probably down to a subjective assessment, but objectively they have roughly the same features available at the engine level), minus particles maybe - Infinite uses a lot more sprites, which is lame. I loved the CE particle system, wish that’d stuck around through the years. Gears 5 also has some pretty low res environmental textures (not all though), particularly in the desert levels. This was nice for low VRAM usage, but it got pretty ugly in quite a few places. For character LOD, Infinite definitely suffers from fuzzy TAA. Get up close to a dead AI or a still Marine - IMO, higher than Gears 5, especially if you were able to get the camera equally as close. Of course, Gears is designed around a fairly far away camera, so it’d be a waste of VRAM on a console to run higher res textures. Do wish they had higher res stuff for PC though.
But yeah, Infinite drops roughly 1/3 perf going to the open world, if not a bit more. Gears is pretty consistent in perf, but it’s still lower for me than Infinite when comparing open section to open section or inside section to inside section when both are set to maximize fidelity. (As an aside, did anyone actually enjoy the Gears 5 open world sections? I absolutely loathed those, so dead and barren. No enemy patrols, no friendly AI, just vast stretches of snow or sand. The points of interest were fun, but really all you got. Couldn’t wander around and get into a fight if you wanted to.)
I think Gears 5, however, absolutely nailed its artistic implementation of graphical features. I don’t think Infinite did poorly, but it suffers in terms of like shadow draw distance, and LOD changes on trees, and stuff like that which makes it feel less put together. Texture resolution is typically good for both, Infinite does better fine detail and TC cut a number of corners IMO, but both are serviceable at the least. And I think Infinite runs its GI system (which I can only assume is screen space given the amount of culling they do and the fact that every single other system is screen space) with lower perf impact than Gears does. I think Gears fuzzes less in slightly moving images due to TAA, but breaks up worse when driving or moving the camera quickly. Infinite is much fuzzier, but holds better in fast movement. Both would benefit from some other form of AA. TAA is one of the worst things to happen to graphical fidelity in games, IMO.
Nope, I wasn’t a fan. I wish both Gears and Halo stuck to its roots.
Hivebusters is really good, though. That’s the roots of Gears. I played through that a few times. Really hope they release a follow up.
I enjoyed Hivebusters a lot more than the main campaign in Gears 5. Some of the set pieces in the main campaign were great, but I think the characters and general setup was better in Hivebusters. Plus, great use of tropical scenery and colors.
@N0_REM0RS3 thanks for the detailed responses. I’m mostly here via mobile and am too lazy to type longer passages using touch.
Global Illumination can be insanely finicky regarding performance. Besides UE, Nier Automata had some stupid performance problems on PC that resulted from bad GI settings and calculations.
If think there was a game dev talk from the Coalition there they showed some Unreal Magic. Its also quite insane what they did in the earlier entries of the series when you think about the hardware limitations they had to work with.
Hive busters > main campaign 
TC also has a good talk about their Tier 2 VRS implementation if you can find it, highly recommended. I think VRS has real potential after a few improvements for clawing back performance from some of these heavier graphical features. I just hope future iterations can clamp down on some of the weird artifacting that happens.
Thanks for the tip, will definitely take a look at VRS. These adaptive technologies are so much more advanced than the vsync from the early days. 60-30-nothing