Gears of War 5 released today for the Xbox One and PC, and as always happens with many high-profile video game releases, there’s a large number of various bugs and issues that players are running into. Like those other games, there are a large number of Gears of War 5 issues.
Gears of War 5’s issues are especially prevalent since the game is also on the PC. Luckily, we’ve got fixes for most of its major issues right here.
While Gears of War 5 was released on the Xbox Play Anywhere program, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a perfect PC port for everyone for the time being. As we said above, things like audio issues, a crash to the desktop bug, and various connection issues plague the campaign story and online modes.
Audio issues
Many gamers on PC that play with headphones are complaining that their audio sounds static or muffled to the point where it’s nearly inaudible. It’s, unfortunately, a known issue on PC if you plug your headset into your controller, but The Coalition has a few options to try and fix it.
Don’t plug your headset into your controller. Plug it directly into your PC instead. If your audio is set to 44.1 kHz, you’d also likely be better off switching it to 48 kHz. If neither of these works, a person on Reddit found a workaround that making use of a Dolby free 30-day free trial seems to fix the audio issues.
There’s also one particular instance where you could use that workaround, though it’s less practical if you live with other people that may complain about the noise of the game: just don’t use headphones to begin with.
Crash to Desktop Fix
Back during the Gears of War 5 tech-test, various issues arose of the game freezing and crashing in a variety of ways. NVIDIA came up with a method of fixing things by updating the drivers, but it seems like the actual game is having the same issue.
NVIDIA has said that they’ll be putting out a new update for those drivers on September 10 according to Twitter, so considering the way that the Tech Test was fixed that maybe your best bet to get the crash-to-desktop issue working again, barring The Coalition issuing a patch that makes it work themselves.
Connection Issues
Considering that this is a high-profile release with a big multiplayer scene that a lot of people are going to be trying to play at the same time, it’s not a big surprise that people are going to be experiencing various connection issues.
These various issues include things like not being able to even find a match in a lobby, having trouble getting into a match entirely, or being dropped from a lobby once it’s been formed. The Coalition has been working hard attempting to get updates out to improve stability, but there’s likely a simple explanation.
Mainly, that since the game is being unlocked in stages around the entire world, it’s likely simple server overload that’s causing the lack of stability and a large number of different issues with multiplayer, so the best way to fix this would likely just be for players to sit and wait for a more stable time.
With how fast The Coalition was working on having its servers stable enough that the player base could get in, hopefully, all of these other fixes for the audio and crashing will also end up helping out, at least in some cases.
Black Screen Fix
This a common issue in PC games but it isn’t a critical one. Gears 5 players are reporting that when they start the game the screen goes black while they can hear the sound in the background.
To fix this, start the game and when the black screen appears, press “Alt + Enter”. The game will go into the Windowed mode and will start to display. Now, go to the video settings and set the proper resolution and you’ll be able to play in fullscreen.
GW503 Error Fix
Players are reporting that when they try to play the game they get the GW503 error. If you’re playing the game on Windows 8.1 then the issue is the OS as Gears 5 doesn’t support Windows 8.1. Meaning, you need to install Windows 7 or Windows 10 to play the game.
Low FPS, Performance Fix
With so many PC configurations out there, there are bound to be performance issues with games even with optimized games as Gears 5. The following are a few steps that will help you eliminate stuttering and improve FPS and performance.
First, make sure there is no background process running that is using too much of your HDD, CPU or GPU. Also, install the latest GPU drivers.
Open Nvidia Control Panel> Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings and select the game from the list. Set “Power Management Mode” to “Prefer Maximum Performance” and set “Texture Filtering- Quality” to “High Performance”. This will eliminate stuttering from Gears 5 and will potentially give you an FPS boost.
That is all for our Gears 5 errors along with fixes and workarounds for issues like Crash, black screen and more.
