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Marcus Fenix in cover inside a hospital in Act 1 of Gears of War 2, rendered at 4K internal resolution by the PC port

The native Gears of War 2 PC port reaches 0.3.18, with four-player co-op and an Android build

santiquiroz recompiles the Xbox 360 game into x64 code from each player's own disc, with no emulator. On November 10 three releases landed in a row, fixing co-op for three or more players and a crash with FSR or DLSS. For now only Act 1 can be played through.

Admin · 2 min

Image: gears-of-war-2-pc-port repository (GitHub)

Built from the retail disc

The project takes the default.xex from each player's own Xbox 360 disc and turns it into native x64 code with the ReXGlue SDK. An earlier unofficial port, Hollow, was built from a leaked 2008 development build. This one uses the retail game, recompiled from the US disc. Other releases such as the European one are untested and may crash.

Act 1 is playable with keyboard and mouse or a controller. The full campaign isn't there yet.

What it already has

  • Internal resolution up to 4K, FSR 1 with CAS sharpening, and FSR 3.1 or FSR 4 temporal upscaling. DLSS only shows up if you build it yourself with NVIDIA's SDK.
  • Native mouse and keyboard in play, and button prompts that follow the last device you used.
  • A genuinely wider ultrawide picture with no black bars.
  • Direct3D 12 by default, with Vulkan as an experimental option.
  • System Link campaign co-op for up to four players, two-player split screen on one PC, Versus and Horde tested on a single machine, and experimental internet play.
  • An experimental Android APK that joins a PC's game on the same network.

Three releases on November 10

Version 0.3.16 shows how to skip cinematics on screen and fixes three co-op problems with three or more players: characters falling out of the level forever, players spawning inside one another, and stragglers left behind by the convoy. The authors note they hadn't tested it online yet. 0.3.17 stops updates from wiping your settings. 0.3.18 fixes the crash when opening Tac/Com with FSR or DLSS on, unbinds the Tab key that opened the engine console and locked up the game, and hides the Android status bar.

One known issue remains: on an RTX 3070 Ti some characters weren't drawn and weapons flickered.

What you need

Nothing from the game is included: you need your own retail Xbox 360 copy of Gears of War 2, as a disc image or an extracted folder. On PC it needs 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 and a DirectX 12 GPU. The code is open source under the BSD-3 license.

Sources

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