Gears of War: Judgement Recomp

Gears of War: Judgment for PC

A native Windows build of Gears of War: Judgment (Xbox 360, People Can Fly, 2013), made by statically recompiling the original game code to x64 and running it on an emulated Xbox 360 graphics and system layer (the ReXGlue SDK).

It is not an emulator running the game code: the game's PowerPC program is translated to C++ ahead of time and compiled into a normal Windows executable. On top of that this project adds a keyboard and mouse scheme with proper mouse look, an unlockable frame rate, SMAA and FSR image processing, automatic quality selection and a number of fixes. See docs/FEATURES.md.

This repository and its releases contain no game data. You need your own copy of Gears of War: Judgment for the Xbox 360. Nothing here is affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft, Epic Games or People Can Fly.

Status: early release. The single-player campaign boots and plays, but testing so far has mostly covered the early part of it. Multiplayer and online features are not supported. Please read Known issues before reporting a problem.

Download and play

1. Open the Releases page of this repository and download the latest GearsOfWarJudgment-PC-<version>.zip.
2. Unzip it into a folder you can write to (not Program Files). It contains two programs:
   • GearsOfWarJudgment.exe: the game, one self-contained file.
   • Graphics Settings.exe: a settings window; keep it next to the game.
3. Have your game files ready: the folder from your own disc that contains default.xex and the GearGame folder. Only the retail version is supported (title ID 4D530A26).
4. Double-click GearsOfWarJudgment.exe. The first time, a window asks for that game folder. It is remembered, so you are only asked once. (If you put the game exe inside the game folder, or the game folder next to it, nothing is asked.)

That is all: no installer, nothing else to download, no extra runtime. The first start takes a few seconds longer because the exe unpacks its files into %LOCALAPPDATA%\GearsOfWarJudgmentPC\bin. Your settings, saves and logs are kept in the folder you put the exe in.

To change graphics settings before playing, start Graphics Settings.exe. It has quality level, texture filtering, anti-aliasing, FSR, frame limit, mouse sensitivity and more, and a Play button. The same settings are in the game under F4.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
• A DirectX 12 graphics card. The quality is chosen from your card automatically (see Quality). It was developed and tested on an NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti and nothing else; AMD, Intel and handheld GPUs use the same code but are untested.
• 8 GB of RAM or more (the game itself uses about 3 to 4 GB). The game files are roughly 7 GB; the cache adds a few hundred MB.
• A reasonably fast CPU. The game is limited by the processor, not the graphics card (see Known issues).

What is in it

Keyboard and mouse	Real keyboard and mouse input into the game's own controls (no gamepad emulation in play), fully rebindable, with raw mouse look: no smoothing, no acceleration, frame-rate independent. Menus work with the mouse and show keyboard prompts. Xbox and other controllers work too.
Frame limiter and unlock	Default 60 fps with evenly spaced frames. Set Frame limit: Unlocked in the settings window for a fully unlocked frame rate (it also turns vsync off). F8 switches the limiter off and on in game. The game's own 62 fps cap is lifted when unlocked.
FPS counter	F9 shows fps, frame time, 1% low and the current quality level.
Settings menu	F4 opens the settings menu: every option below can be changed in game and is saved.
SMAA + FSR	SMAA anti-aliasing and AMD FSR 1.0 upscaling/sharpening of the final image, each switchable.
Lighter Low level	Only on the Low quality level, the engine's heaviest effects (dynamic lights and shadows, decals, bloom, depth of field, ambient occlusion and similar) are turned off to help weak graphics cards and handhelds. Medium and High are never touched, and the game folder is not modified. It can be switched off in Graphics Settings.
Automatic quality	Low / Medium / High chosen from your GPU, lowered for the next launch if 60 fps is not held.
Shader and pipeline cache	Compiled graphics pipelines are remembered on disk, so each area stutters only the first time.
Cleaner image	Film grain, motion blur and the game's own FXAA are off by default; community resolution-scaling fix applied.
Saves	Checkpoint saving and loading across restarts works.

Everything is explained in detail, with every setting name, in docs/FEATURES.md.

Controls

Keyboard and mouse play goes straight into the game's own input system: it receives real key and mouse events, so its aiming, cover and weapon logic behave exactly as with a controller. A controller still works too (Xbox pads, and anything SDL recognises); the game switches between them as you use them.

Action	Default keys
Move	W A S D
Look and aim	Mouse movement
Fire / aim down the sights	Left mouse button / Right mouse button (hold)
Cover, vault, roll, sprint (hold)	Space
Pick up weapons and ammo, revive, use	E
Crouch	Left Ctrl or C
Melee, execute a downed enemy	F or V
Reload (hold to rev the chainsaw)	R or mouse button 4
Zoom	T or middle mouse button
Swap weapons	1, or the mouse wheel
Grenade	2
Weapon slots	3, 4
Look at a point of interest	Q
Tactical command	H
Walk (slow)	Z
Pause	Escape
Scoreboard	/

Every one of these can be changed in Graphics Settings.exe (the Key bindings button: click an action, then press the new key or mouse button; right-click adds a second key) or by hand in config/gowj.toml, for example bind_reload = "R,ThumbMouseButton". The list of setting names is in the file's Controls section. A key can only do one thing: a key used elsewhere moves to the action you give it.

In menus the game has no cursor, so the mouse drives the selection: scroll the wheel to move up and down, move the mouse to step in that direction, left click to accept and right click to go back. Enter accepts, Backspace goes back and Escape is Start. The button prompts in menus show keyboard names such as [Enter] and [Esc] unless a controller is connected when the game starts (setting gowj_prompts: auto, keyboard or controller). The small button pictures in some in-game hints are part of the game's artwork and still show controller buttons.

Known issues

• Only tested on one PC (Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RTX 5070 Ti, Windows 11). AMD and Intel graphics and handheld PCs are untested. They should pick lower quality settings automatically, but expect rough edges and please report what you see.
• CPU limited. About 90 to 110 fps unlocked on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D; a slower CPU gives less.
• For an unlocked frame rate, set Frame limit to Unlocked in Graphics Settings.exe. F8 in game does not turn off vsync, so it may stay at half your monitor's refresh rate.
• Unlocked can stutter or tear without a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor. Use the 60 fps limit if so.
• Short freezes the first time you enter an area. Graphics pipelines are compiled on first use (a fraction of a second, occasionally a little more). They are saved, so the same area is smooth afterwards. The cache lives in %LOCALAPPDATA%\GearsOfWarJudgmentPC\cache and can be several hundred MB.
• Small hitches in busy scenes, about one frame in 200.
• Single-player campaign only. Multiplayer and Xbox Live features are not available.
• Menus have no mouse cursor. The game was not designed for one; the mouse moves the selection.
• The settings menu (F4) pauses SMAA/FSR while it is open, so the picture looks softer until you close it.
• Thin, distant geometry (antennas, wires) can shimmer, because there is no temporal anti-aliasing.
• The game renders at 720p on every quality level (1440p was removed because it was too heavy for most PCs).
• DLSS and FSR 3.1/4 temporal upscaling is not in this release. It flickered while moving at the render sizes the game can draw, so it is paused until that is fixed.
• Windows only.

Building from source

See BUILDING.md for the full steps. In short, you provide two things:

• default.xex from your own copy of the game (the retail Xbox 360 disc version, title ID 4D530A26), placed at game/default.xex in the repository folder
• the ReXGlue SDK (Windows x64, version 0.10.0.9-dev)

then run scripts\build.ps1 -Sdk <sdk folder>. The recompiled game code is generated on your machine from your default.xex and is not part of this repository.

Reporting problems

Open an issue and attach the newest file from the logs folder next to the program (and gowj_crash.log if there is one). Say which graphics card and Windows version you use.

License

The source code in this repository is under the BSD 3-Clause license (LICENSE). Third-party components keep their own licenses (THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt). The license does not cover the game itself, which belongs to its owners and is not included.

Credits

• ReXGlue SDK, the runtime this builds on, which is derived from the Xenia project.
• XenonRecomp for the idea and the recompilation approach.
• AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0 and SMAA (Jimenez et al.), see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt.
• The Low level engine settings follow the community low-end "Coalesced_INT" mod for Xenia from ModDB. The values are applied to your own game files at run time; no game file and no file of that mod is shipped.
• The xenia-canary community patch set for this title (film grain, FXAA and resolution-scaling fixes), re-implemented here as switchable settings.