Gears of War: E-Day System Requirements

Official PC requirements

These figures come from the Steam store page and Xbox Wire's gone-gold announcement, which published the full spec sheet. TweakTown and PCGamingWiki list the same numbers, with PCGamingWiki adding the Intel Arc cards. All three tiers assume an upscaler is on.

The two hard requirements

First, your graphics card must support hardware ray tracing. Cards without dedicated ray tracing hardware are not supported and will not run the game. Ray tracing is always on: ray-traced lighting, reflections and shadows cannot be switched off.

Second, you need an SSD. A hard drive is not supported at any tier, and the official space requirement is 115 GB. The actual PC download is about 120.04 GB, so leave at least 120 GB free.

Why the specs assume upscaling

Every official tier is quoted with DLSS, FSR, XeSS or TSR switched on, aiming for 60 FPS. PC hardware analyst Daniel Owen flagged this as his main concern with the spec sheet. In his view, the figures likely rely on dynamic resolution scaling as well.

In practice, that means native-resolution performance will be lower than the targets suggest. If you dislike upscaling, plan for a tier above what the table says. If you are happy to upscale, the targets are a reasonable guide.

Real-world performance

Daniel Owen tested an RTX 3060 with a Ryzen 5 5600X in the open beta. With default dynamic resolution, it mostly held 60 FPS at the Medium preset. At native 1080p with TAA it averaged about 45 FPS, and DLSS Quality brought it back to around 60 FPS.

At the high end, an RTX 5070 Ti at maximum settings and native 1440p ran below 30 FPS in the beta benchmark. At minimum settings the same card averaged 105 FPS, and the game still looked good. Owen described the game as hard on both the GPU and the CPU.

These were beta results, and performance may differ in the final release. Use the built-in benchmark mode to test your own system. Then tune with our best PC settings guide.

Technical details

• DirectX 12 only, 64-bit only
• DirectStorage 1.3.0
• Unreal Engine 5.6.1 (as labelled in the executable)
• Easy Anti-Cheat
• First game to combine NVIDIA RTX Mega Geometry with Unreal Engine 5's Nanite

DirectStorage is part of why an SSD is mandatory. It streams assets directly from fast storage, which a hard drive cannot keep up with. It is also involved in a Game Pass launch error covered on our crash fixes page.

Drivers and Intel Arc setup

During the beta, the official minimum drivers were NVIDIA 610.74, AMD 26.6.4 and Intel 101.8864. Updating to the latest driver is the first fix for most launch problems. NVIDIA released drivers with E-Day-specific optimisations around launch.

Intel Arc A580 and B580 owners must enable Resizable BAR (ReBAR) and Above 4G Decoding in the BIOS. Without them, the game may not run properly. Shaders are also recompiled on each launch on Arc, so startup takes longer.

Can my PC run it?

1. Check your graphics card supports hardware ray tracing. NVIDIA RTX 20-series and newer and AMD RX 6000-series and newer are the typical starting points, matching the minimum spec.
2. Check you have at least 6 GB of VRAM and 12 GB of system RAM.
3. Make sure you have 120 GB free on an SSD.
4. Confirm you are on Windows 10 64-bit 22H2 or later.

If you pass all four, you can run it. If you are close to the minimum, expect to use Medium settings with upscaling. Our PC page covers Steam vs the Xbox app, and Steam's two-hour refund window gives you time to test.

VRAM and memory

VRAM requirements scale with the tier: 6 GB for minimum, 8 GB for recommended and 12 GB for Ultra. System RAM starts at 12 GB, with 16 GB recommended for both higher tiers. KidSmoove's breakdown of the specs highlighted those VRAM steps as the key thing to check.

If your card has less VRAM than the tier you want, lower texture quality first. Ray-traced reflections and shadows are also heavy on memory and GPU time. Our best PC settings guide lists which options cost the most.

Which tier should you aim for?

For 1080p gaming, a card at or above the minimum spec will do with upscaling at Medium settings. For a sharper 1440p experience, the recommended tier is a better target. Ultra is for 4K displays and requires a top-end CPU as well as GPU.

The Ultra CPU picks, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Core i7-14700K, show how CPU-heavy the game can get at high frame rates. Do not overlook the processor if you are upgrading. A balanced system will perform better than a fast GPU paired with an old CPU.

Console and handheld alternatives

On Xbox Series X|S the game targets up to 4K at 60 FPS. The install is about 120.5 GB there. Steam lists the game as fully optimized for Steam Deck, Xbox Ally X and Xbox Ally.

If your PC falls short, Xbox Cloud Gaming streams the game with Game Pass Ultimate. See our Game Pass page for which tiers include cloud play.