Gears of War: E-Day PC Performance Review

Gears of War: E-Day is out today on Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Steam, following an early-access period that kicked off on October 1. Developed by The Coalition and published by Xbox Game Studios, E-Day takes the series back to Emergence Day, and from what I've played so far, it already feels like it has the true DNA of Gears running through it. The weighty combat, darker atmosphere, and familiar brutality are all here, but for this piece, I wanted to see how all of that translates to the PC version.

It has a lot going on technically. You get ray-traced shadows, reflections and global illumination, alongside DLSS 4.5, Multi Frame Generation, and RTX Mega Geometry. The latter is especially interesting since E-Day is the first game to ray-trace Nanite geometry using RTX Mega Geometry.

For this review, though, I wanted to see how all of that actually runs on the RTX 5070. So, let’s take a look.

Testing Rig

For testing, I paired the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which sits on the MSI Z890 Gaming Plus Wi-Fi motherboard, and 48GB of Kingston Fury Renegade non-binary DDR5 RAM clocked at 6000MT/s (using XMP Profile 3). Storage was handled by a Kingston NV3.

Gears of War: E-Day was tested on the Acer Nitro XV275K P5, a 27-inch 4K Mini LED gaming monitor with a 160Hz refresh rate. I used the game's built-in benchmark for all the performance numbers below.

Gears of War: E-Day Graphics Settings and RTX Mega Geometry

There is a lot to play around with in E-Day's graphics menu. Beyond the usual textures, geometry, reflections, volumetric fog and post-processing settings, you can individually adjust Global Illumination, Ray Tracing Geometry, Ray Traced Shadows and RTX Mega Geometry. DLSS gets plenty of options too, with Ultra Performance, Performance, Balanced, Quality and Native modes available alongside Frame Generation.

What I particularly like, though, is how clearly E-Day tells you what you're getting yourself into. Select a setting and the game gives you a short explanation of what it does, along with indicators for how heavily that setting hits the GPU, CPU and VRAM.

RTX Mega Geometry, for instance, is marked High across all three, which immediately tells you this isn't a setting you should blindly switch on. The menu also shows your GPU and available VRAM at the top, so on my RTX 5070 I could see the 11.7GB available while making changes. Mega Geometry itself requires a GPU with at least 12GB of VRAM, something the game also tells you right there in the menu. That's a small thing, but I wish more PC games explained their settings this well.

Another thing I appreciate is that none of this requires restarting the game. I could jump between presets, change DLSS modes, toggle RTX Mega Geometry, and generally mess around with the graphics settings without being thrown back to the desktop. More games have started doing this, and it's always a blessing when you're trying to dial things in. Credit where it's due.

As for the graphics preset, you can choose from Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Ludicrous. For most of my testing, I stuck to 4K, the High preset, and DLSS Balanced.

Gears of War: E-Day RTX 5070 Performance

I used E-Day’s built-in benchmark for all of these runs, with every test carried out at 4K. Most of my time was spent on the High preset with DLSS Balanced, since that felt like the most realistic place to start on an RTX 5070 at 4K. From there, I switched Frame Generation and RTX Mega Geometry on and off to see where the bigger gains and compromises were coming from before seeing how well the game scales at Low preset, too.

The RTX 5070 gets off to a pretty good start here. At 4K High with DLSS Balanced, RTX Mega Geometry disabled and no Frame Generation at all, the benchmark averaged 62.51fps. That is already enough to play E-Day comfortably around the 60fps mark.

And it helps that the game looks excellent at these settings. A lot of what stood out to me during the first few hours had less to do with sheer texture detail and more to do with how the lighting brings everything together. In the opening missions, red emergency lights reflect across wet roads and puddles, while the same light spills into the holes the Locust emerge from. Darker interiors also retain plenty of detail instead of simply turning into crushed black areas. E-Day uses ray-traced shadows, reflections, and global illumination, and those systems are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.

RTX Mega Geometry adds another layer to that, although its effect is much easier to miss while you are actually playing. I compared the same scene with it enabled and disabled, and the biggest difference was in the smaller shadows. A man sitting on a bicycle was casting an incomplete shadow with Mega Geometry off, while enabling it filled in more of the missing detail from both the rider and the bicycle. I noticed something similar with a Coke can lying on the ground, where its shadow looked more complete with the higher-detail geometry being used for ray tracing.

That lines up with what the feature is supposed to do. RTX Mega Geometry allows the game to use full-quality Nanite geometry for ray tracing instead of a simplified version, which can make smaller objects, complex silhouettes, and their shadows more accurate. The difference is there, and once I knew what to look for, I could see it. But this is also the kind of thing I had to stop playing and actively compare before it became obvious.

There is a cost attached to it as well. With High settings, DLSS Balanced and 2x Frame Generation, I averaged 109.45fps with RTX Mega Geometry disabled. Enabling it brought that down to 97.74fps, which works out to roughly an 11 percent drop. Average VRAM usage also climbed from around 5.9GB to 7.7GB, with the latter run peaking at roughly 7.9GB.

That makes RTX Mega Geometry more of a nice-to-have on the RTX 5070 than something I’d keep enabled all the time. The extra detail is there, especially in smaller shadows and fine geometry, but most of it disappears into the background once you are actually playing and slashing through everything.

Still, it’s hard not to appreciate what’s happening under the hood here. E-Day is the first game to use RTX Mega Geometry to ray trace Nanite geometry, and seeing even tiny objects and their shadows being represented more accurately gives you a pretty good idea of where this tech could go next.

Even with Mega Geometry switched on, 2x Frame Generation still averaged 97.74fps, so there is plenty of room if you would rather keep the additional ray-traced geometry detail. Moving all the way up to 4x Frame Generation pushed the result to 168.46fps with High settings and Mega Geometry enabled. I would not treat that figure as the same thing as the GPU natively rendering 168fps, since Multi Frame Generation is inserting additional generated frames, but on a 160Hz monitor the difference in motion smoothness is very easy to see.

I also ran the Low preset, partly to see how much extra performance there was to gain, but also to get a better sense of how well E-Day scales down. With DLSS Balanced, RTX Mega Geometry enabled and Frame Generation off, the RTX 5070 averaged 76.81fps at 4K. With 2x Frame Generation, that climbed to 122.34fps.

On the RTX 5070 itself, I wouldn't really bother dropping this far. High is already sitting around the 60fps mark without Frame Generation, and 2x FG takes it comfortably beyond 100fps with Mega Geometry disabled. But the Low results are still useful because they show there is quite a bit of performance to work with here. If you're on a slower GPU, dropping the preset, lowering the resolution, or leaning a little more on DLSS should give you room to find a playable balance without immediately having to strip everything back. I wouldn't use these numbers to predict exact performance on another card, but they do suggest E-Day has some decent scalability built in.

Verdict

Gears of War: E-Day looks excellent, and the lighting is easily one of its strongest aspects. Ray-traced shadows and reflections add plenty to the atmosphere, while RTX Mega Geometry brings smaller improvements. Performance is just as encouraging. The RTX 5070 managed the game excellently.

For RTX 40-series cards, Frame Generation still gives you a useful bit of headroom, so you can afford to keep the visual settings fairly high and use FG to smooth things out. RTX 30-series owners will need to be a little more conservative, but 1080p should still be a sensible target with DLSS and a few settings dialled back. The good thing is that E-Day scales down quite well, so lowering a preset or trimming a few heavier effects doesn’t completely take away from what makes the game look good.