I played Gears of War: E-Day on PC with Nvidia's RTX Mega Geometry — and the Xbox franchise has never looked better

It almost feels like blasphemy to play Gears of War: E-Day on PC — and to top it off, on Steam — rather than its natural home on Xbox. Almost. But after cranking up settings to Ultra, bumping up frame rates with Nvidia's DLSS 4.5 trickery and basking in ray-traced lighting, it was easy to take Marcus Fenix and his merry band of absolutely ripped soldiers beyond its console roots.

Developers The Coalition and People Can Fly are bringing the iconic third-person shooter back to the beginning: Emergence Day. That's when the gruesome Locust Horde army first emerged from the ground to cause chaos for the humans above, and that perfectly sets the stage for beautifully rendered mayhem and destruction.

After flanking and sawing my way through Locust (scum) for over 12 hours, I can say Gears of War: E-Day is the best the franchise has ever looked, and it's excellently optimized for PC gaming. From its highly detailed gore and destruction to its accurate lighting and shadows with RTX Mega Geometry, it nails the visual horrors of war and the smooth performance of its brutal, cover-based combat.

Even better, there's a huge variety of graphics settings to tinker with to get the right performance for your PC setup. It even includes a "Ludicrous" preset for power-hungry gaming rigs! So, is Gears of War: E-Day worth playing on PC? Yes, and for the reasons why, I've got you covered below.

Gears of War: E-Day PC Requirements

Gears of War: E-Day can be a demanding title to run, but it can also be as performance-driven and as light on your system as you need it to be, thanks to the lengthy list of graphics options and upscaling methods you can adjust.

While the developers are sure to have E-Day optimized for Xbox Series X/S, they've made sure to give the PC port some extra care so it can run on a majority of systems. That includes the best PC handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally X.

While you won't need the best graphics cards to run the latest Gears of War installment, know that you will need a "hardware ray tracing-capable GPU," as the developers note. You'll also need a lot of space, so make sure you have enough storage.

Here are the official requirements, along with the PC specs I used.

Geared up for PC

Now, being made in Unreal Engine 5 (as many games have been recently) can be hit or miss, depending on the title. E-Day has been specifically rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, but don't fret; it's a hit.

By taking Gears back to the devastating events of Emergence Day, the game has a lot of carnage to take advantage of. From massive locusts erupting from roads to the warm lights of a city at night disrupted by raging fires on exploded cars, E-Day knows how to showcase the atrocities of a sudden invasion by an unknown threat, and it's visually stunning.

That was all shown off in striking detail on a gaming PC that isn't exactly a beast of a rig, either. I played Gears of War: E-Day on the Quoted Tech Frontier gaming PC, with an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 GPU and 32GB of RAM. I was able to play in 4K and get a respectable 50 FPS on High settings, and I was still bursting Locust heads with smooth gameplay despite it being taxing on my system (there was a warning sign to say 4K would be a little much).

But that was without the boost from Nvidia's DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Frame Generation or Dynamic Upscaling Quality. With these toggled on, and even bumping up ray-traced shadows, reflections and geometry to Ultra, I was seeing Marcus, Dom and the rest of the team charging their way through hordes in crisp detail at a smoother 115 FPS. That's a green flag for PC optimization.

Now, this was the case in the more linear sections of the game. During a semi-open area I encountered, I noticed a few minor sudden dips in frames, cutting down by 15 to 20 FPS. That, and some pop-in artifacts every now and again. A deal-breaker? Not in the slightest, and something I could remedy myself.

Scaling back to 1440p resolution and switching to Performance upscaling gave me far smoother gameplay, and with frame generation at 6x? I was going well past 200 FPS, and my aging gaming monitor doesn't even go that high.

Being able to tinker with an assortment of settings to get the right balance of image quality and performance is always welcome, and Gears of War: E-Day has it in spades.

Lighting is on point

From the soft hum of street lamps lighting up a crumbling street in ruins to the tight, horror-like spaces in buildings being lit up with the glow from neon signs and TVs, E-Day shows that Gears of War has come very far from the gritty, desaturated browns that plagued late-2000s games. And it's only elevated further on PC with Nvidia's latest tools.

E-Day marks the first title to ray trace Nanite geometry, thanks to the added RTX Mega Geometry. Essentially, this means more realistic details in ray tracing, solving issues like missing or incorrect shadows, improved reflection quality, better stability for moving silhouettes and overall more geometry on objects to play with.

This isn't immediately noticeable, of course. Not when there's a mass of Locusts emerging from collapsing holes, charging at you with shotguns! But during the quieter moments exploring abandoned grocery stores, ravaged police stations and more, it's the ray-traced lighting and relfections that captures the atmosphere.

Switching RTX Mega Geometry on, the smaller details like the florescent lighting in the frozen section of a store bouncing off the floor, or the clear reflections of debris lying around on a blood-smeared window, are striking to look at. And having this on didn't appear to affect the performance of my gameplay, either.

This is subtle realism to make the surroundings of Marcus and his team feel more lived-in, which makes the war-torn city of Kalona far more engaging.

Optimized for destruction

As anyone playing games on the Xbox app, Steam or other clients will tell you, PC optimization is an important aspect of bringing any title to PC. Fortunately, we've seen many standout hits this year alone, and now this iconic Xbox franchise joins those ranks. Gears of War: E-Day is one of the best-looking PC games I've played in 2026, and that says a lot considering we've seen the likes of Control Resonant, Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem arrive and impress.

While targeting 4K at 60 FPS on Xbox is already enough to show all the glorious, gory visuals E-Day has in store, playing the origins of the Gears of War saga on PC allows it to take advantage of the latest in graphics. I mean, cranking up the destructive details with 100+ FPS, along with scene-defining lighting and crisp reflections, is a treat for the eyes.

If this is the way AAA games are being treated on PC, I have high hopes for everything else to come (especially for the upcoming GTA VI).

For a closer look at our thoughts, be sure to check out our full Gears of War: E-Day review.

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