Gears of War 2 / Gears of War 3 / Gears of War: Judgment (COGBox)

Games: Gears of War (Xbox 360, 2006) · Gears of War 2 → (Xbox 360, 2008) · Gears of War 3 (Xbox 360, 2011) · Gears of War: Judgment → (Xbox 360, 2013)

Native Windows versions of Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, and Gears of War: Judgment for Xbox 360, made by static recompilation (with a preview of the first Gears of War since 0.3.0), with a launcher called COGBox that sets up your copy of each game and starts it. The Xbox 360 code is translated ahead of time to C++ and compiled into Windows programs; the hardware parts are supplied by its own renderer on Direct3D 12 (or Vulkan, experimental), which offers resolution from 1x to 4x, SMAA, FSR, DLSS, and XeSS, high frame rates, HDR10, ultrawide, split screen (in Gears 2), keyboard and mouse, and DLC and zip mods. The author says it is playable with a few hiccups: in Gears 2 every chapter plays in testing, and Gears 3 and Judgment are playable; on SteamOS (via Proton) there are texture glitches. Since 0.3.0 (October 31) releases are labelled pre-release. The Windows download is a zip of about 510 MB with the already compiled programs, which we haven’t checked inside; the README says it includes no game content. 88 of its 93 commits list Claude as a co-author.

You needYour own copy of each game: Gears of War 2 (US disc, version 0.0.0.5, plus Title Update 6), Gears of War 3 (disc plus Title Update 6), and Gears of War: Judgment (disc plus Title Update 4), as an .iso image, Games on Demand copy, or folder; for the Gears of War preview, the disc plus Title Update 5. 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 with Direct3D 12 and about 8 to 16 GB free per game if COGBox unpacks the image.

How it gets to PC

Static recompilation

Console

Xbox 360

Architecture

PowerPC

Author

Shagg88

Original studio

Epic Games / People Can Fly

Year

2008

Gears of War 2 (santiquiroz) See all →

Gears of War: Judgment (OverkillLabs3) See all →