Gears of War: E-Day PC performance review: great visuals, but you need powerful hardware

The Coalition is back with its latest entry in the Gears of War franchise, Gears of War: E-Day. Set years before the original Gears of War, the game takes players back to Emergence Day and serves as a prequel to the mainline series. While we’ll share a complete game review soon, the purpose of this story is a little different.

This performance review is for PC gamers who may be planning to buy the game and want to know how it runs on a PC, whether there are any major graphical issues or bugs, and how well optimised it is as a whole. E-Day is also an important title from a PC hardware perspective, as it is one of the first titles to support NVIDIA RTX Mega Geometry, alongside technologies such as DLSS 4.5, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, DLSS Super Resolution, DLAA and NVIDIA Reflex.

It also happens to be one of a growing number of PC games that require a ray-tracing-capable GPU for its minimum specifications. It follows titles such as DOOM: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This makes E-Day a good example of where PC gaming is heading, with ray tracing and AI-powered rendering becoming a core part of the experience.

My system

For this performance test, I primarily used the Lenovo Legion Pro 5, a premium gaming laptop with capable hardware and excellent thermal performance. It uses an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070ti 12GB GPU (140W), 32GB DDR5 RAM and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. This makes it a suitable system for testing how the game performs.

Table of Contents

PC requirements

Before getting into performance, let’s look at the PC requirements for Gears of War: E-Day. The game requires a hardware ray-tracing-capable GPU even at the minimum specification, with NVIDIA recommending an RTX 5060 or RTX 3060 Ti GPU for 1440p at 60fps on the High preset. The Ultra preset, meanwhile, calls for an RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 9070 XT for 4K at 60fps.

For this review, my rig sits somewhere between the minimum and recommended requirements. It has enough VRAM to meet the recommended specification, but being a laptop GPU, its power limits mean it doesn’t have enough juice to run the game comfortably at the Ultra preset.

Using the game’s built-in benchmarking tool, I found a mix of Ultra settings to be a better fit for the hardware. Even then, the game is quite demanding, which gives you a good idea of just how much hardware E-Day can consume. We’ll get into just how well it performs below.

Performance: a demanding game that makes good use of DLSS

For my testing, I played Gears of War: E-Day at 2560 × 1600, which is the native resolution of my laptop’s display. I used DLSS Quality with 4x Frame Generation and a mix of Ultra settings. I’ve shared my complete settings below for reference.

One thing I noticed while playing was some shimmering, particularly around shadows and reflections. Increasing Reflections and Ray Tracing Geometry to the Ludicrous setting helped reduce this a lot, so I preferred keeping both at the highest setting despite the additional load. The game also lets you enable RTX Mega Geometry, which I kept on throughout testing.

I also found 4x Frame Generation to be a good balance for this game. It pushes the average frame rate to around 128fps in the built-in benchmark and about 140 in-game, while NVIDIA Reflex keeps input latency low enough that I didn’t feel like I was playing with much delay. This makes the performance uplift from Frame Generation quite worthwhile, especially so on a laptop GPU.

Despite all these settings, VRAM usage peaked at around 7.5GB, which is still below the 12GB capacity of the RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU. That’s encouraging for anyone with an 8GB card, although the higher settings can obviously push memory usage depending on the resolution and other settings.

The game is also rather heavy on the CPU, and my Core Ultra 9 275HX, which is essentially a desktop-level processor in terms of performance, still has to work quite hard here. The benchmark shows that around 50 per cent of the workload is GPU-bound, however, so a desktop GPU with a higher power output should be able to push better frame rates.

Overall, E-Day is clearly a demanding title, but the good news is that it makes fairly sensible use of the hardware. With DLSS Quality and 4x Frame Generation enabled, I could run a mix of Ultra settings at native resolution while keeping the experience smooth. A desktop equivalent of the RTX 5070 Ti will offer considerably more power to run the Ultra preset with these settings.

Graphics: an exceptionally good-looking game

Make no mistake, Gears of War: E-Day is a gorgeous-looking game, and there are moments when it looks almost photorealistic. This is particularly true at night, when the red emergency lighting spills across the environment, reflecting off surfaces and illuminating the debris scattered across the streets.

The ray-traced shadows, reflections and global illumination do a lot of the heavy lifting here, creating a convincing sense of depth that goes beyond simply having detailed textures.

It’s also worth discussing what RTX Mega Geometry does, as this is one of the first commercial implementations of NVIDIA’s technology. It improves the geometric detail used for ray tracing, allowing the game to render more accurate shadows and other lighting effects on complex objects.

RTX Mega Geometry-on
RTX Mega Geometry-off

This is pretty useful in environments like E-Day’s, which are filled with rubble, broken structures and smaller objects that can be difficult to represent accurately with conventional ray tracing.

RTX Mega Geometry-on
RTX Mega Geometry-off


I compared the same scene with RTX Mega Geometry enabled and disabled, and the difference is subtle at first glance. If you look closer at the debris scattered across the floor and the smaller objects around the environment, you can spot more convincing shadows and better contact between objects and the surfaces around them. This also helps improve ambient occlusion, adding depth and contrast to areas where objects meet or overlap.

It isn’t a night-and-day difference, and subtle you probably won’t notice every improvement while moving through the game or fighting enemies. However, the effect becomes more apparent in dense environments, where there are plenty of small objects for the lighting system to account for.

I’d recommend keeping RTX Mega Geometry enabled if your GPU has enough power for it. The improvement isn’t always obvious, but it adds to the overall visual quality in impactful ways, particularly in scenes with lots of environmental detail. E-Day already looks excellent without it, but this is a good example of how newer rendering techniques can improve image quality beyond increasing texture quality.

Verdict

Overall, Gears of War: E-Day performs well on capable hardware, although it is clear that this is a demanding game. My RTX 5070 Ti laptop GPU handled it rather well at 1600p with DLSS Quality and 4x Frame Generation, but you will need more powerful hardware if you want to push the highest settings while keeping a high native frame rate.

There are a few visual issues, mainly some shimmering around shadows and reflections, and these can still show up even with the settings pushed to the highest levels. But I found them much less apparent once I was actually moving through the game. They are not enough to take away from what is otherwise a very impressive-looking title.

The newer rendering features are also a nice addition if your hardware can support them. RTX Mega Geometry does not create a dramatic difference in every scene, but the more accurate shadows and ambient occlusion around smaller objects add more depth in busy environments. The same goes for the game’s other ray-tracing features, which help E-Day look particularly good in darker scenes.

E-Day is definitely demanding, but it also gives capable PC hardware plenty of reason to stretch its legs. With RTX 5070 GPUs and 32GB of RAM becoming more common (based on Steam’s latest hardware survey), the hardware needed to enjoy these features is becoming easier to find. If your PC has the hardware chops, E-Day is a great showcase of what modern PC gaming can look like.

Editor Rating: 8/10

Pros

Cons

Home Gaming
Related Articles
© 91digital Web Private Limited. All Rights Reserved.