The official PC requirements for Gears of War: E-Day have been published, and they make ray tracing hardware mandatory. According to GameSpot's report on the specs, graphics cards without dedicated ray tracing support are not supported at any preset, which leaves widely used cards such as Nvidia's GTX 1060 and AMD's RX 5000 series unable to run the game. GameSpot noted that this makes the RTX 2060 the effective entry point for playing the game.
E-Day is not the first release to take that approach; GameSpot pointed to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle as an earlier game with the same baseline requirement. The Coalition, the game's developer, said it has kept working on PC stability and performance across a wide range of hardware configurations since July.
The three presets
The requirements are split into three tiers, each tied to a graphics preset and a resolution and frame-rate target:
- Minimum (Medium preset, 1080p at 60fps): Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 or RTX 2060, or AMD Radeon RX 6600 or RX 9060; AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel i7-6850K or i5-10400; 6GB of VRAM and 12GB of RAM.
- Recommended (High preset, 1440p at 60fps): GeForce RTX 5060 or RTX 3060 Ti, or Radeon RX 6700 XT or RX 9060 XT; Ryzen 5 5600 or Intel i5-11600K; 8GB of VRAM and 16GB of RAM.
- Ultra (Ultra preset, 4K at 60fps): GeForce RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 7900 XT; Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Intel i7-14700K; 12GB of VRAM and 16GB of RAM.
Memory requirements top out at 16GB of RAM even at the Ultra preset. Every tier requires installation on a solid-state drive, with 115GB of free space needed. The game supports Nvidia DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4 and Intel XeSS 3.0 upscaling, and The Coalition said it includes a built-in benchmark tool so players can tune performance on their own systems.
Gears of War: E-Day launches on October 6 for Xbox Series X|S and PC, and will be available on Xbox Game Pass on day one. The game depicts the first encounter between the humans of the planet Sera and the Locust.
