Xbox Series X Gears 5 update gives you the option to replace Marcus Fenix with Dave Bautista

(Image credit: Microsoft Xbox)

Gears 5's next-gen upgrade offers some serious improvements to the game's graphics, loading times, and frame rate. The news analysis comes from Digital Foundry, who spoke to two developers from The Coalition.

The most obvious improvement in the next-gen version is to the graphical fidelity of the game. Both wide shots and character close-ups are far more detailed than before, and shadows have also been improved. The Coalition has taken advantage of the Series X's extra power to add extra detail to many areas throughout the campaign, and ray-tracing means that there are more, better-quality reflective surfaces which appear more realistic than even those on the PC version's 'insane' settings.

Elsewhere, the upgrade introduces higher average resolutions and better framerates. The Xbox Series X's dynamic resolution reportedly averaged out a little higher than 1700p (the Xbox Series S can only make it as high as 1440p), and bottoming out at 1080p. There are improvements to framerate too, but those are particularly apparent in multiplayer, where the game apparently barely dips below 120fps. Sadly for splitscreen players, however, you'll remain limited to just 30fps.

Finally, the action will be a lot faster than before. Input latency on the Xbox Series X version is down an average of 37 milliseconds compared to the Xbox One X, a figure that drops even further in multiplayer. Loading times are also way down - from around 45 seconds on current-gen consoles to less than ten seconds on the new hardware.

The technical changes are significant, but if you're more interested in the game itself, you'll still be well catered for, from new difficulty modes to the introduction of actor Dave Bautista as a skin for Marcus Fenix.

Find out about more about Gears 5 unlockable characters.