Gears of War: E-Day PC Graphics Performance Tested
Developers at The Coalition have rebuilt Gears of War: E-Day from the ground up using Unreal Engine 5, introducing advanced next-gen lighting and geometry features.
Radwan AbdulhadiEditor and technology writer
Unreal Engine 5 and MegaLights Technology
Gears of War: E-Day transports players back to the beginning of the iconic franchise, developed by The Coalition entirely within Unreal Engine 5. Notably, the game serves as the first shipping title to implement UE5's MegaLights technology, which enables artists to illuminate virtual spaces using hundreds of dynamic, real-time ray-traced light sources. Further details are available from Tom's Hardware in the original source material.
The implementation creates a distinct next-gen atmosphere, utilizing lighting sources such as flashing emergency vehicle lights and interior fluorescent tubes. To evaluate the hardware demands of this presentation, testing was conducted across a broad array of hardware, including specialized analysis covering the game's unique demands on processors, which can be reviewed in the Gears of War E-Day CPU benchmarks report.
Graphics Quality Presets
The game provides five distinct quality presets: Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Ludicrous, with Ludicrous functioning as the equivalent of Cinematic modes seen in other Unreal Engine 5 titles. While lower settings can improve frame rates on aging hardware, dropping down to the Low preset heavily reduces shadow detail and ambient occlusion, resulting in a less realistic appearance on various surfaces.
Moving from Medium upward introduces more subtle graphical refinements, such as softer foliage shadows and enhanced texture sharpness. Because the Medium setting retains most of the game's visual richness without the severe compromises found on the Low setting, players using older or lower-end GPUs have a viable path to achieving playable performance.
RTX Mega Geometry Implementation
In addition to MegaLights, Gears of War: E-Day incorporates Nvidia's RTX Mega Geometry technology, designed to efficiently handle ray-tracing for complex meshes like foliage. Exposed as an in-game toggle, Mega Geometry yields subtle improvements, including enhanced core self-shadowing on trees and more accurate shadow casting on small objects and hanging foliage.
Although the underlying technology is technically compatible with graphics cards dating back to the Turing architecture, the game restricts the feature toggle to hardware equipped with 12GB of VRAM or more. Benchmarks observing the feature's performance cost noted a consistent roughly 10% performance drop across supported GPU generations.
Upscaling and Frame Generation Support
Gears of War: E-Day offers a vendor-inclusive suite of upscaling solutions, supporting DLSS, FSR, XeSS, and Epic's cross-platform TSR. Among the vendor-specific implementations, DLSS delivers the sharpest and most stable image quality in both stationary and motion scenarios.
Radeon users on RX 9000 and RX 7000 series cards running FSR achieve strong results, though older hardware utilizing fallback FSR versions encounters visual artifacts and flickering. For RDNA 2 card owners experiencing these older fallback issues, Intel's cross-platform XeSS upscaler provides a visibly improved alternative image quality.
Frame generation features are similarly included across hardware vendors, featuring DLSS Multi Frame Generation and AMD's FSR ML Frame Generation on compatible hardware. However, older Radeon series cards currently encounter grayed-out options, which are anticipated to be addressed in future updates.
Sources
- Tom's HardwareGears of War: E-Day PC graphics performance tested
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