Conclusion

Gears of War: E-Day is a Gears game, and it does not pretend otherwise. Taking cover is still the heart of the combat, the guns still feel the way these guns have always felt, and the mechanics have not been reinvented for the game. Nothing here will surprise anyone who has played a Gears game before. That is not a complaint—E-Day is a well-made version of a concept that ensured 40+ million copies sold so far.

The story is solid, with the obvious caveat that comes with any prequel: you already know roughly where this goes and who walks away from it, so the interest has to come from the finer detail rather than the final outcome. It's nice to be in a city that's not completely destroyed (yet), with people actually living in it.

The co-op multiplayer deserves a mention of its own. It is excellent—properly built, fun, and feels like the right way to enjoy the game, especially at higher difficulty levels.

Graphics
Gears of War: E-Day looks good, sometimes excellent. The strongest part of it is the map design—while linear, the levels are nice to move through and to look at, everything is well-designed, with strategically placed light sources, shadows and reflections.

The backgrounds deserve a mention of their own. There is almost always something going on in the distance: fires burning, fighting that you are not part of, the city coming apart a few streets away. It helps establish the feeling of a living world, not just a map tunnel that you're walking through. Some objects in the game are noticeably low poly, and once you have spotted it in one place you start seeing it in others. It's not a huge dealbreaker, but we've seen finer details in other recent releases.

Cutscenes are definitely one step up from the interactive game. Facial animations on the main characters are superb—Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is still slightly ahead of it. Different type of game, but both Unreal Engine 5, so I wouldn't call it an unfair comparison. Secondary characters are definitely worse and look somewhat stiff, which stands out a bit more than expected, also because this is a super high-value AAA production from Microsoft.

Accessibility
The difficulty handling is better than most games manage. There are several presets, but on top of that, you can adjust the individual pieces, so you are not stuck choosing between too easy and too punishing—you keep the parts of the challenge you want and soften the ones that are frustrating.

Ray Tracing
You can't turn ray tracing off. None of the ray tracing settings has an "Off" entry, they all run from "Low" to "Ludicrous," so the only thing that defines how your GPU is tracing rays is which quality level you pick. Hardware ray tracing for Lumen's global illumination turns on at "High," and ray traced shadows at "Ultra." Below that, Lumen falls back to software tracing, which still traces rays, just against the engine's distance fields instead of the BVH. This is also why there's no ray tracing performance comparison in this review. There's no clean on/off to compare.

Overall, RT looks good in the game, and when playing, it becomes apparent that the game was developed with RT in mind.

RTX Mega Geometry
Gears of War: E-Day is one of the first games to ray trace Nanite geometry, which is what RTX Mega Geometry does. Without it, the rays get tested against a simplified version of the object, which means small and/or complex objects with irregular shapes cast a slightly wrong shadow, and reflections lose detail. With it on, the rays hit the full quality geometry.

What changes under the hood is the BVH, the structure the ray tracer tests its rays against (you cannot see the BVH in-game, it's an invisible acceleration structure for RT). Mega Geometry makes that much finer, so small details that weren't in it before can now contribute to ray traced effects, shadows mostly. The shadows end up more correct, defined by the geometry that's actually there instead of a rough approximation of it.

You can see this in our comparison screenshots, but you have to go hunting for it, it's not something that jumps out while you're playing. The performance cost is low, like a few FPS, maybe 5%. VRAM is the bigger cost. At 4K with "Ludicrous" it goes from 13.0 GB to 14.6 GB, an extra 1.6 GB. If you have the memory, definitely turn it on. You also need a GeForce RTX card with at least 12 GB before the option shows up at all, which rules out a good part of the RTX install base, but makes sense. No reason you should spend the memory on an 8 GB-class card.

The technology itself isn't that new. NVIDIA announced Mega Geometry at CES 2025 alongside RTX 50-series. The idea is to store ray traced geometry as a hierarchy of small triangle clusters instead of one big acceleration structure, which cuts both the memory the BVH uses and the time it takes to rebuild when things in the scene move. That rebuild cost is what has always made detailed ray traced geometry expensive. Blackwell's RT cores have hardware support for it, but it isn't a Blackwell-only feature.

NVIDIA expects the idea to end up in Microsoft's next DXR 2.0 specification. AMD is working on its own version, called "Dense Geometry Format," which covers rasterized geometry as well as ray traced, but no current Radeon card has hardware acceleration for it.

Upscaling, Frame Generation
After recent disappointments, finally a game that ships with all three upscalers. NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS are all supported, with Unreal's own TSR as a fallback option. Frame generation is included, too, for all vendors, using their newest tech. This means that NVIDIA DLSS goes up to 6x, and Intel XeSS up to 4x. One oddity around AMD FSR support is that the option is always labeled "FSR 4." But FSR 4 requires a modern RDNA GPU to work. The option is displayed on NVIDIA, Intel and older AMD GPUs, too—always called "FSR 4." We tested it, and it definitely renders differently than TSR when activated on an incompatible GPU, so it's not just a TSR fallback. I think it simply falls back to an older version of FSR, which makes sense, of course, but leads to some naming confusion.

Shader Compilation & Stability
Be prepared to wait. This sucks. On first launch the game compiled shaders for over 15 (!!) minutes before it let us reach the main menu, and it does this again every time the GPU or the driver changes. On every subsequent restart of the game, the "compiling shaders" screen shows up, even though there isn't anything new to compile, and your drive already has all the shaders in a compiled version. This screen takes like 5–10 seconds, so no huge deal, but still definitely a lack of polish. Once in-game, there is no traversal stutter, so at least that long wait is doing its job.

What's an even bigger problem is that, at least in our press review build, every time I changed hardware and waited 15 minutes for the shaders to compile, the game crashed on level load. It did this almost every time, and took three or four attempts before a map would load. After that it settles down. For this testing we swap graphics cards constantly, so we hit this issue far more often than a normal player will. But unless they fixed it, this means that for many people the game will crash, and they'll be like WTF just happened. They might try another time, maybe a third one, and then refund and leave a happy Steam review. Do not give up, keep going, eventually the game will load fine. Well, almost always: when testing the RX 6900 XT, the GPU crashed every single time and I couldn't load the map at all (there was a nice "AMD Radeon Settings detected a GPU crash" message, but that doesn't solve the problem of course).

There is supposed to be a fix for this shader compilation wait. Microsoft has been rolling out Advanced Shader Delivery, which downloads shaders from the cloud, the right ones for your hardware and driver combination, so that your PC doesn't have to build them. E-Day is one of the first titles meant to use it, but it didn't work for us. On NVIDIA that's expected for now, the drivers that support it aren't due until after launch. On AMD, it should already work, according to the game's reviewer's guide: the requirement is driver 26.7.1 or newer, and we tested on 26.9.2. The full 15 minute compile happened anyway.

Hardware Requirements
All our performance numbers are "Ludicrous" at native resolution, no upscaling, which, as it turns out, is unrealistically demanding. You'll almost certainly actually play with an upscaler and/or lowered settings.

At native 1080p, only seven cards clear 60 FPS: RTX 5090, RTX 4090, RX 9070 XT, RTX 5080, RX 7900 XTX, RTX 4080 and RTX 5070 Ti. Below them everything sits in the 40s and 50s. 1440p thins out fast. The RTX 5090 is the only card above 60 FPS, at 77.0. The RTX 4090 gets 58.8, the RTX 5080 50.0 and the RX 9070 XT 47.6. 4K60 at these settings is impossible for anything: the RTX 5090 manages 46.5 FPS, the RTX 4090 35.0, and the rest of the field is in the twenties or below.

So upscaling isn't a bonus here, it's how the game expects to be played, and it works: DLSS Quality takes the RTX 5090 at 4K from 45 to 74 FPS, and that's without frame generation yet, which easily doubles and triples the FPS. Plan on using it and pick your preset accordingly.

Settings Scaling
Beyond "Ultra," there is a "Ludicrous" setting, which is something we've also seen as "Cinematic" in many Unreal Engine titles. Gears just names it differently. Stepping down from Ludicrous to Ultra already gains you 49%—definitely worth it given the tiny differences in visual quality. Going even lower scales performance accordingly, up to 110% going to "Low."

If you look at our comparison screenshots, there isn't a huge difference between low and ludicrous. The game actually still looks pretty decent, and is 100% playable of course. This is a bit of a lost opportunity—ideally low should look like PlayStation 2 with 400 FPS native, and the way to the highest setting should be fairly smooth and equally stepped, giving you more eye candy for the FPS. But that's how settings scaling works in most Unreal Engine 5 games.

VRAM
This game is memory hungry. Even at "Low" it wants 5.4 GB at a laughable 1600x900 and 8.0 GB at 4K, which already tells you 8 GB is the minimum. At max settings we got 8 GB at 1600x900, 10 GB at 1440p and 13 GB at 4K—yes, this is one of the few titles that runs out of VRAM on 8 GB cards even at 1440p.

Turning on RTX Mega Geometry at 4K takes that from 13 GB to 14.6 GB, well past the 12 GB NVIDIA requires. That's less of a contradiction than it looks. 14.6 GB is the worst case: 4K, "Ludicrous," no upscaling. The point of the 12 GB floor is that you can have Mega Geometry with upscaling, or with other settings lowered. Upscaling renders at a lower internal resolution and brings memory use down with it.