Gears of War: E-Day PC Performance Review: The Best Looking Game in Years – Delhi News Daily

Gears of War: E-Day, the next major Xbox console exclusive, arrives on Xbox Series S/X and PC on Tuesday, October 6. The third-person shooter, the first new mainline game in the Gears series in seven years, marks the revival of one of Xbox’s core franchises alongside Halo and Forza. With E-Day, developer The Coalition has chosen to return to the roots of the series, going back to the titular Emergence Day, 14 years before the events of the first game, when the Locust tore out of the surface on Sera and plunged humanity into a never-ending war with the horde.

But while the studio is looking back on the story of Gears of War: E-Day, its sights are set firmly forward when it comes to the technology driving the narrative and the action in the game. E-Day, taking advantage of modern graphics technologies, is the most technically robust and visually accomplished Gears title ever made. These technical advances are most apparent in the PC version of the game, for which The Coalition collaborated with Nvidia to implement graphics upscaling, ray tracing, and other features that push the game’s visual fidelity and performance.

Before diving into how the game runs on PC, let’s review the PC-specific enhancements. The most notable of these is Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry, a real-time rendering and ray tracing technology that boosts geometric detail and improves ray tracing quality across shadows, reflections, and global illumination. Mega Geometry, available on GeForce RTX GPUs, enables ray-traced Nanite geometry. Gears of War: E-Day is the first title to feature ray tracing geometry.

E-Day also includes the full suite of ray tracing features, including ray-traced shadows, reflections, and global illumination, delivering realistic, immersive lighting, shadows, and reflections across different times of day, indoor and outdoor areas, and lighting conditions.

As expected, Gears of War: E-Day supports DLSS 4.5, Nvidia’s AI-powered graphics upscaler, with dynamic multi-frame generation on PC to significantly boost framerates. Additionally, the game features controls for Nvidia Reflex, which helps reduce latency, DLSS Super Resolution for resolution upscaling, and DLAA for native resolution.

Gears of War: E-Day comes with ray-traced global illumination
Photo Credit: Microsoft/ The Coalition (Screenshot – Manas Mitul)

Gears of War: E-Day PC Specifications

Gears of War: E-Day is a demanding PC title and requires a minimum of 12GB of RAM. To play the game at 4K, 60fps on the Ultra graphics preset, you will need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti or an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT. However, the game is optimised to run at 1080p, 60fps on entry-level GPUs like the GeForce RTX 5050 or RTX 2060 and the Radeon RX 6600.

Bear in mind that Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry feature, which enables ray-traced geometry in the game, requires a GeForce RTX GPU with at least 12GB of VRAM for the best experience.

Here are the official PC system requirements for Gears of War: E-Day.

Gears of War: E-Day PC specifications
Photo Credit: Microsoft/ The Coalition

Gears of War: E-Day Performance

I tested Gears of War: E-Day on an Alienware 18 Area-51 laptop with Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 (24GB VRAM), and 64GB of RAM—provided by Dell for the purpose of the review. I had no hiccups running the game on the high-end PC, as benchmark numbers will show.

The most striking aspect of E-Day’s visuals is the lighting. Ray tracing features shine here, creating realistic reflections across different surfaces. This is clearest in the neon-drenched streets of the game’s first mission, Emergence.

Ray-traced lighting shines in Gears of War: E-Day
Photo Credit: Microsoft/ The Coalition (Screenshot – Manas Mitul)

Gears of War: E-Day running at Ultra preset
Photo Credit: Microsoft/ The Coalition (Screenshot – Manas Mitul)

The other thing to notice: with RTX Mega Geometry and Ray Tracing Geometry enabled, the boost in geometric detail on small objects is noticeable in complex scenes, including accurate shadows, reflections, and silhouettes. With Mega Geometry on, more objects are ray-traced, as well. You can see the result in the screenshot below.

RTX Mega Geometry boosts geometric detail of small objects and improves ray tracing implementation
Photo Credit: Microsoft/ The Coalition (Screenshot – Manas Mitul)

I tweaked the graphics settings and used the in-game benchmarking tool to check the results. Gears of War: E-Day ran smoothly in all scenarios.

At 2560×1600 resolution, DLSS upscaling set to Native, and frame generation disabled, I recorded an average frame rate of 53fps with graphics set to the Ultra preset (RTX Mega Geometry on). Changing DLSS upscaling to Dynamic (which upscales image resolution based on GPU load) returned an average frame rate of 88fps.

With Frame Generation on and set to Dynamic, plus Native DLSS upscaling, the average frame rate jumps to 238fps. With Dynamic upscaling, it goes even higher, to 318fps. And when I set frame generation to 6X, I recovered more frames, averaging 352fps.

With DLSS frame generation set to 6X, Gears of War: E-Day ran at well over 300fps
Photo Credit: Microsoft/ The Coalition (Screenshot – Manas Mitul)

Here are the recorded average frame rates across different resolution settings. Testing was done on the Ultra graphics preset with DLSS upscaling and frame generation both set to Dynamic.

As you can see, Gears of War: E-Day shines on top-end PC hardware. It is a robust technical release that brings the most cutting-edge graphics features present today. E-Day is also extremely polished; I didn’t notice any major visual bugs or glitches, or PC crashes, while playing—an impressive feat given the poor PC optimisation in recent major releases.

RTX Mega Geometry and ray-traced geometry features, along with the excellent implementation of ray-traced lighting, push Gears of War: E-Day’s visual presentation to new heights, delivering a definitive PC experience and one of the best-looking games of this generation.