Gears Tactics – Fix lag, stuttering, fps drops and crashing

Gears Tactics stuttering lag fps drops crashing fixGears Tactics is a turn-based tactics video game developed by Xbox Game Studios. It is a direct spin-off of the popular Gears of War series. Gears Tactics is not a sequel though, it is in fact a prequel to the first game.

Just like XCOM games, Gears Tactics is played from a top-down perspective in which players control human soldiers by issuing commands to them, in order to eliminate the enemies in a map. Players are free to explore the map as there are no restrictions or barriers.

Every character in the game can perform a total of three actions:

  • Take cover
  • Shoot enemies
  • Stay in overwatch to shoot any moving enemy in their line of sight

The game features five classes and they all have their own unique abilities. The characters can be extensively customized with mods, armours, and they can acquire new skills after they level up.

In addition to the main campaign, players can complete different side-missions. After the player finishes the campaign, Veteran Mode will be unlocked. It allows players to remix the campaign missions with different modifiers such as bonus damages and accuracy penalty.

Does Gears Tactics have a Multiplayer mode?

No, Gears Tactics is a single-player game and there is no multiplayer mode present in the game.

Gears Tactics – Fix lag, stuttering, fps drops and crashing

Now that you know what Gears Tactics is all about, lets go ahead and talk about the performance of the game. Let me start by saying that this game is very poorly optimized. The games eats up resources like anything and if your system is not capable then get ready to make a refund on Steam.

Apart from that players are already complaining about performance issues like stutters, freezes, lag, crashes, etc. That is why we decided to come up with a Gears Tactics Performance guide that will show you some simple tweaks that you can try in order to fix the performance issues that you are having.

Check the Minimum System requirements of Gears Tactics

Though this is a very obvious thing to do, a lot of people actually buy games without checking out the system requirements. This is actually the first thing you should check. So make sure that your system has the ability to handle Gears Tactics. Because after taking a look at the minimum system requirements of the game you should be able to tell whether this game is suitable for your system or not.

Lets take a look at System Requirements of Gears Tactics :

Minimum:
  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit (May 2019 Update)
  • Processor: Intel i3 Skylake | AMD FX-6000
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: AMD Radeon R7 260X | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
  • VRAM: 2 GB
  • DirectX: Version 12
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: 45 GB available space
  • Sound Card: DirectX compatible
Recommended:
  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit (May 2019 Update)
  • Processor: Intel i5 Coffee Lake | AMD Ryzen 3
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: AMD Radeon RX 570 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
  • VRAM: 4 GB
  • DirectX: Version 12
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: 45 GB available space
  • Sound Card: DirectX compatible

Ideal:

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit (May 2019 Update)
  • Processor: Intel i7 8700 | AMD Ryzen 7
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Graphics: AMD Radeon VII | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
  • VRAM: 16 GB
  • DirectX: Version 12
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: SSD + 45 GB free
  • Sound Card: DirectX compatible

Recommended for Laptops:

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit (May 2019 Update)
  • Processor: Intel i7 1065G7
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Intel Iris Plus Graphics
  • DirectX: Version 12
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: SSD + 45 GB free
  • Sound Card: DirectX compatible

As you can see, Gears Tactics is a quite heavy title. So you need to have a decent rig in order to even run this game. You also need to have Windows 10 64 bit on your system or this game won’t even launch for you.

Update your Graphics Card drivers

If you are facing crashes then that might be because of your outdated graphics drivers. Though Nvidia and AMD have not released drivers specially for Gears Tactics, it is wise to use the latest ones. Here are the links:

  1. Nvidia Drivers
  2. AMD Drivers

Windows 10 May 2019 update

You have to make sure that you have at least the May 2019 update of Windows 10 installed on your PC. The game will not boot on builds older than that. So if you are someone who doesn’t like to update their OS, this is the right time to do so.

Gears Tactics Best Graphics Settings

Here are the full specifications of our test rig:

  • CPU : Intel i3-8100 @ 3.60Ghz
  • GPU : Zotac GTX 1060 6GB
  • RAM : 16GB DDR4 2400mhz
  • HDD : 1 TB 7200 rpm
  • Monitor Resolution : 1920×1080
  • OS : Windows 10 Professional 64-bit

The graphics or video settings we decided to go with:

Go Settings > General

  • Display Mode : Full Screen
  • Resolution Scale : 1920×1080 / 100%
  • Vertical Sync : Off
  • Minimum Frame Rate : None
  • Maximum Frame Rate : Unlimited
  • Cinematic Frame Rate : Unlimited
  • Cinematic Scaling Mode : Fill

Go to Textures

  • Character Texture Detail : Medium
  • World Texture Detail : Medium
  • Effects Texture Detail : Medium
  • Texture Streaming : Medium
  • Texture Filtering : 8X Anisotropic
  • Shading Quality : Best
  • Cone Step Mapping : On
  • Sharpening : 2.0

Go to Environment

  • Volumetric Fog : On
  • Planar Reflections : On
  • Glossy Reflections : Off
  • Screen Space Reflections : Medium
  • World Detail : Medium
  • Contact Shadows : Cinematics And Gameplay
  • Shadow Resolution : 2048×2048
  • Dynamic Shadows : Medium
  • Particle Spawn Rate : 0.7
  • Dynamic Object Lifetime : 0.7

Go to Post Process

  • Sub Surface Scattering : On
  • Depth of Field : Cinematics And Gameplay
  • Motion Blur : Cinematics And Gameplay
  • Anti-aliasing : Best
  • Bloom Style : Standard
  • Bloom : Medium
  • Lens Flare Intensity : Medium
  • Ambient Occlusion : High

Go to Advanced

  • GPU : Auto
  • Mesh Complexity : Best
  • Tilted Resources : ON
  • Async Compute : Off
  • Diagnostic Mode : Off

Go to Accessibility

  • Motion Blur : Off
  • Lens Flare Intensity : Medium

Nvidia Control Panel settings for Gears Tactics

The first thing you should do is click on ‘Adjust image settings with preview‘ located on the left side under 3D settings and make sure that ‘Use the advanced 3D image settings‘ is selected. Now:

  • Open Nvidia Control Panel
  • Click on Manage 3D settings on the left bar
  • Click on Global Settings
  • Now tweak the following settings:
    Image Sharpening : Off
    Threaded Optimization : On
    Power Management : Prefer Maximum Performance
    Low Latency Mode : Off
    Texture filtering – Quality : Performance

If you are using Nvidia GeForce Experience then turn off the in-game overlay. Here is how to do it:

  • Launch GFE
  • Click on the Settings icon located at the top-right corner
  • Click on General
  • And just turn off In-Game Overlay

AMD Control Panel Settings for Gears Tactics

Launch the application and click on Global Graphics.

  • Radeon Anti-Lag : Disabled
  • Radeon Boost : Disabled
  • Image Sharpening : Off
  • Anti-Aliasing Mode : Use Application settings
  • Anti-aliasing Method : Multi-sampling
  • Morphological Filtering : Off
  • Anisotropic Filtering : Disabled
  • Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
  • Surface Format Optimization: Enabled
  • Tesselation Mode: AMD Optimized
  • Wait for V-sync: Off
  • OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
  • Shader Cache: AMD optimized
  • Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
  • GPU Workload: Graphics
  • Radeon Chill: Off
  • Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

Tweak your Discord settings

This is something that we have experienced personally. On our personal gaming rig consisting of RTX 2060 Super, i5 8400, 16 GB 3000mhz RAM, Discord initially gave us a really tough time when we were regularly playing games like Destiny 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019 and Apex Legends. Every time we used to start Discord, online games used to start lagging horribly.

So, it is recommended that you make few tweaks in order to stop Discord from reducing the performance of your system. Here is what you need to do:

  1. Launch Discord
  2. Go to User Settings
  3. Click on Voice & Video from the left sidebar
  4. Scroll down to Advanced section
  5. Disable “OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco System, Inc.”
  6. Disable “Enable Quality of Service High Packet Priority”
  7. Click on Overlay from the sidebar
  8. Disable in-game overlay
  9. Click on Appearance from the left sidebar
  10. Scroll down all the way to the Advanced section
  11. Disable Hardware Acceleration
  12. Restart Discord

Those are all the fixes we have for Gears Tactics at the moment. It is true that the game is not properly optimized at the moment but the developers are already aware of the issues and are working to fix them.

If you visit the Official Steam Discussions page of Gears Tactics, then you will be surprised to see that how many players are actually experiencing these issues. With that being said we will keep on updating this article with the latest fixes.

If you think this guide had helped you then let us know in the comment section below. Also, If you are facing problems that are not mentioned on this article then also you can comment below. We will try come out with a fix. Good luck!


That’s all folks!

Last Updated on April 28, 2020

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