Gears of War: E-Day PC graphics performance tested: 43 GPUs take us back to the start of an iconic saga

Gears of War: E-Day takes us back to the very beginning of one of the most beloved sagas in gaming: Emergence Day. And to tell this new chapter in the Gears story, developers at The Coalition rebuilt Gears entirely from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5. On top of all-new assets, E-Day is the first shipping title that uses UE5’s MegaLights technology. This tech allows artists to light a space with hundreds of dynamic ray-traced light sources, all in real time.

MegaLights immediately stands out as something different and distinctly next-gen for real-time graphics. Right from the start, Gears of War: E-Day made the hair stand up on the back of my neck with its haunting use of light and shadow. As I fought through the first bloody minutes of Emergence Day with protagonists Marcus and Dom and some new recruits in tow, I was struck by the power of dynamic lighting from sources like the flashing lights on police cars and ambulances.

And as I walked through a ravaged supermarket, I was amazed by the diversity of realistic light sources in the scene, from flickering TVs to fluorescent tubes in the frozen foods aisles. To find out what level of graphics horsepower Gears' incredible presentation demands in exchange for a 60 FPS average, I wiped the Locust guts off and got to testing performance across 43 of our graphics cards to see which GPUs were up to the job.

If you're interested in CPU performance, check out our Gears of War E-Day CPU benchmarks, as well.

Image quality analysis, low to max settings

Gears of War: E-Day offers five quality presets: Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Ludicrous (seemingly equivalent to Cinematic in other Unreal Engine 5 titles). We captured screenshots at the same location in-game using all five of these presets so you can get a sense of the image quality changes at each one.

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If you have to turn down settings to achieve playable performance, I wouldn’t personally go any lower than Medium, as Low brutally crushes the shadows (which may or may not be a bug) and loses a lot of ambient occlusion, creating a sort of cardboard cut-out look on surfaces like the car headlights in the comparison scene above. Check out the rather cartoony-looking destroyed building on the right edge of the frame, too, where the destroyed interior and intact exterior aren’t naturally shadowed.

From Medium on up, the differences are more subtle. Shadows from foliage become softer and more detailed as we move from Medium to High to Ultra, more bounce light might be visible on some surfaces, and textures might be slightly sharper, as expected. But you’re not losing a ton of visual richness if you have to step down to Medium. And as you’ll see in our performance results, that’s a good thing for older and lower-end hardware.

Image quality with RTX Mega Geometry

In addition to Unreal Engine's MegaLights, Gears of War: E-Day is also one of the first titles to ship with Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry tech. Mega Geometry allows for efficient ray-tracing of highly complex meshes like those used for foliage. E-Day exposes Mega Geometry as a toggle, so it’s easy to compare its impact on scenes.

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In the examples above, RTX Mega Geometry creates subtle but solid improvements. The most noticeable effect of the feature is that trees have more natural self-shadowing in their cores, and shadows and ambient occlusion on some surfaces can also be visibly improved. We also found that hanging foliage (as can be frequently seen spilling out of planters in the game’s early segments) cast more accurate shadows with the feature enabled, but you’re not generally sticking your nose up close to those objects. Small objects in rubble piles might also show crisper and more accurate shadows, too.

RTX Mega Geometry is technically compatible with graphics cards ranging all the way back to Turing, but Gears will only let you enable it on cards with 12GB of VRAM or more, which wasn’t a common spec before the RTX 40-series family rolled around.

I didn’t have time to test the performance cost of Mega Geometry on every compatible card, but for those I was able to test, I saw a roughly 10% performance cost, and that drop seemed consistent across GPU generations.

If you’re looking for the absolute best image quality with E-Day, I would certainly enable Mega Geometry, especially after creating the side-by-side comparison images above. But this also isn’t a game where you’re standing around and appreciating pretty trees too much, so if you want better performance, you can also leave Mega Geometry off without raining potatoes on Gears’ image quality.

Notes on upscaling and frame generation tech

Gears of War: E-Day is refreshingly vendor-inclusive when it comes to upscaling and frame generation technologies. It features the latest DLSS, FSR, and XeSS tech on compatible graphics cards, as well as Epic's cross-platform TSR upscaling.

As we've come to expect, DLSS upscaling looks the best of the three vendor-specific upscaling solutions. It offers the sharpest and most stable image quality at rest and in motion.

FSR 4 on RX 9000-series and RX 7000-series cards looks great, if a tiny bit less stable on the finest details in motion compared to DLSS. But because you’ll want to steer clear of super-low input resolutions for upscaling to begin with to avoid placing more load on the CPU, DLSS’s current advantages at low input resolutions are less important in this title than they are in Control Resonant, for example. In short, RDNA 4 and RDNA 3 gamers will have a great time with upscaling enabled.

If you’re on an RX 6000-series Radeon, whatever fallback version of FSR is being used in this game is really showing its age. Surfaces visibly boil and crawl when the player is at rest, and high-contrast edges show distracting flickering. This option considerably worsens the presentation of the game.

The cross-platform version of XeSS available to RX 6000 cards doesn’t totally correct these issues, but it looks far better than FSR 2 or 3. If you’re still gaming on an RDNA 2 card and want the best possible image quality, we’d favor Intel’s upscaler.

Frame generation is also available across all three major graphics vendors. DLSS Multi Frame Generation is present and works as expected. AMD’s FSR ML Frame Generation appears to be present, as well, and it works on RX 9000-series cards without a (figurative) hitch.

But if there’s a fallback to an older FSR version for earlier graphics cards, it seems to be broken, as the feature is grayed out on RX 7000 and RX 6000 series cards. We expect that this is a bug or oversight and will be fixed, but it made it hard to see whether framegen was possible or working properly on those older cards.

Finally, for Intel, XeSS 3.0 with Multi Frame Generation is also present and functional, although the level of performance on offer from Arc cards might not be high enough to allow for large amounts of frame generation at acceptable input latencies. Still, XeFG is another handy tool for tuning your Gears experience to taste.

Performance analysis at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K

Since Gears requires RT and takes a mostly vendor-neutral approach to its graphics feature set, the performance story is pretty simple. We don’t have to generate tons of comparison data for RT on and off, and we don’t have to contort various settings to create a scalable workload across GPU vendors.

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At 1080p, some clear performance trends immediately emerge. RTX 50-series cards hold a slight raw performance edge in average FPS over Radeon RX 9000-series hardware, but the Radeons demonstrate significantly higher 1% low frame rates.

Subjectively, Gears seems to exhibit more obvious hitches than we’ve seen in a modern game of late, and Nvidia cards might suffer more from that behavior than Radeons, especially at this lower resolution. But on a high-refresh-rate, variable-refresh-rate monitor, those hitches only occasionally poke through on cards from either vendor.

The 1% low superiority of the RX 9000 series isn’t universal, either, as the combination of FSR 4 and RT seems to weigh more heavily on RX 7000-series cards. The RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT would generally land close to the RX 9070 XT, but here they fall below even the RX 9070. The RX 7800 XT also performs more in line with the RX 9060 XT than the RX 9070 GRE here. That’s the price you pay for the superior image quality of FSR 4 on GPUs that lack the matrix math accelerators needed to run the model at its best.

The TL;DR for those seeking a 60 FPS average at the 1080p Ultra preset is that among current-gen cards, you’ll want an RTX 5060 at the bare minimum and preferably an RX 9060 XT or RTX 5060 Ti (at least if you were lucky enough to get one before prices for those products shot through the roof). The RX 9070 GRE and RTX 5070 provide a solid higher-refresh-rate experience, while the RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, and RTX 5070 Ti all clear the 90 FPS mark.

If you want a native 60 FPS-ish average at 2560x1440 Ultra, you need an RX 9070 GRE or RTX 5070 at minimum, and you really want an RX 9070, RX 9070 XT, or RTX 5070 Ti.

But given the broad availability of high-quality upscaling and frame generation options in this game, it’s worth grabbing FrameView (for all vendors) or pulling up the Nvidia Overlay and seeing whether your baseline PC latency is low enough with Quality upscaling (say) to consider adding framegen to the mix on compatible cards. Gears features Nvidia Reflex and responds well to AMD’s Radeon Anti-Lag feature in the driver, so it’s a great candidate for frame generation.

And that’s good news indeed, because at a native 4K Ultra, Gears simply can’t run at a 60 FPS average on anything short of the RTX 5090. The RTX 4090 comes close, but even it could really use a dose of DLSS upscaling and (optionally) frame generation to provide a fluid experience. Lesser hardware will require some personal dialing-in of upscaling and frame generation settings to arrive at the ideal balance between a smooth experience and solid image quality.

Gears of War: E-Day 1080p performance scaling on RTX 3060

The RTX 3060 remains the most popular graphics card on Steam. We've already seen that it isn't well suited to running Gears at native resolution with Ultra settings, so we used it to test performance scaling across all of the game's available presets, both with and without upscaling, to see what a large group of gamers needs to do to achieve a good experience.

At native resolution, not even the Low preset can get the RTX 3060 over the 60 FPS hump. We wouldn't recommend using Low alone to boost performance for the reasons outlined in the image quality analysis earlier in this review. You're giving up a lot of image quality for no good reason when upscaling is available.

You can also see why the maxed-out Ludicrous preset isn't realistic for most cards, as it cuts performance roughly in half versus Ultra. If you're going that route on most GPUs, you will certainly need a dose of upscaling and frame generation, and since the build of Gears we used doesn't expose cross-platform framegen options, you're stuck in the mud on the 3060. (You can't mod in framegen using Optiscaler without risking a ban, either, as Gears uses Easy Anti-Cheat.)

Dialing in DLSS Quality at 1080p affords more freedom for balancing image quality and performance on the RTX 3060. Medium settings plus DLSS Quality gets us over a 60 FPS average with reasonable 1% lows, and we know from our earlier analysis that Medium looks quite a bit better than Low, so this is a fine place to be.

If you're willing to tolerate the potential for larger performance drops, you can even shift up to High, but 1% low frame rates take a big hit, and more demanding scenes might chug a little. We'd stick with Medium for the best all-around experience, but you can choose your own adventure.

Dialing in more aggressive upscaling settings at 1080p to boost performance on the 3060 isn't a great idea, as residual RT noise is already creeping into parts of the scene with DLSS Quality. We'd really love to have DLSS Ray Reconstruction at our disposal here, given the extensive RT effects and poor apparent image quality of Gears' internal densoiser. One can only hope that such an update is coming later.

Bottom line

Gears of War: E-Day is an incredible technical showcase for the PC. As the debut title for Unreal Engine 5’s MegaLights feature, it uses light to gorgeous, often cinematic effect. The dynamic lighting and shadows in this game feel distinctly next-gen. If you obsess over the artistic qualities and usage of light like I do, you will frequently be wowed by the variety and intensity of effects on display. And the assets that those lights fall on mostly look like a million bucks. In short: this game is a feast for the eyes.

In exchange for its jaw-dropping lighting and detail, E-Day requires a strong CPU for the best performance in addition to a powerful graphics card. Check out our full CPU performance analysis for more details.

Given its demands, Gears may have some gamers with older hardware contemplating an upgrade. At a native 1920x1080 Ultra, the ever-popular RTX 3060 falls well short of a 60 FPS average, and anything less powerful than a Radeon RX 7700 XT or RX 6800 XT is also way off that pace.

In our supplementary tests, we found that the RTX 3060 needs 1080p Medium settings and DLSS Quality to clear the 60 FPS bar. But Gears still looks decent at Medium, so you’re not giving up too much eye candy in the bargain.

For a native-res 1080p Ultra and 60 FPS-ish experience, you want an RTX 5060 at a minimum, or a Radeon RX 9060 XT for a considerably smoother ride.

For higher-refresh-rate displays at 1080p, the RX 9070 GRE comes out as a bang-for-the-buck champion, shadowing the RTX 5070 for roughly $300 less at current pricing. And if you want even higher performance, the RX 9070 hits the 90 FPS mark on average for not that much more cash.

At 2560x1440 Ultra, an RTX 5070 or RX 9070 GRE both fall just short of a 60 FPS average, so upscaling or frame generation (or both) may be required to get over the hump. But you really want an RTX 5070 Ti or an RX 9070 XT for the best experience and value.

Native 4K Ultra gaming in this title is practically impossible without frame generation, upscaling, or both. Only the RTX 5090 can clear a 60 FPS average, and the RTX 4090 falls just short. Every other graphics card is way behind, so if 4K is your goal, it’s time to start dialing in those performance boosts.

Since input latency is well-controlled with Nvidia Reflex or AMD’s driver-level Radeon Anti-Lag in this game as a baseline, you can usually enable DLSS FG at will on Nvidia cards (or FSR frame generation with more care) and go about your gory business.

Although this game isn’t an Nvidia-backed path-tracing showcase like many of the headline AAA releases of 2026, GeForce gamers still get one unique feature that Radeon owners don’t. Gears implements RTX Mega Geometry for more accurate RT on objects with lots of fine geometric detail, like leaves and rubble, and it seems to improve shadows and ambient occlusion on some surfaces, too. If you have a GeForce card with 12GB of VRAM or more, Mega Geometry is well worth its roughly 10% performance cost.

Given E-Day’s already extensive integration of Nvidia tech, we really would have liked to see DLSS Ray Reconstruction included in this game. The stock RT denoiser seems far from perfect and leads to visible boil or instability in shadows and reflections, and the overall detail in reflections isn’t quite up to par with what we’d expect. Ray Reconstruction makes a major difference for the quality of those effects in Control Resonant, and we’d like to see what it can do here, too.

But even so, Gears of War: E-Day sets a new high-water mark for what's possible from PC graphics, and I can't wait to dig deeper into the game to see how MegaLights enhances the rest of the experience. Don't be surprised if this title takes a spot in our next GPU Hierarchy update.