Gears of War: E-Day Goes Gold: System Requirements and Everything You Need to Know Before Launch

The Coalition has officially announced that development on Gears of War: E-Day is complete — the game has gone gold, and the studio has begun pressing discs and preparing the final digital builds. Alongside the good news, the developers published detailed system requirements for the PC version. The project launches on October 6, 2026, on Xbox Series X|S and PC, and owners of the Premium editions can start playing five days early, on October 1.

System Requirements: Ray Tracing Support Is Mandatory

One of the port’s key features is its requirement for mandatory hardware ray tracing support. According to the official table from The Coalition, the game cannot be launched on graphics cards without Ray Tracing.

Minimum requirements (1080p, 60 FPS, medium settings with upscaling):

• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 / RTX 5050 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 / RX 9060;
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, Intel Core i7-6850K or Core i5-10400;
• RAM: 12 GB;
• VRAM: 6 GB.

Recommended requirements (1440p, 60+ FPS, high settings):

• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 / RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT / RX 9060 XT;
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 5600 or Intel Core i5-11600K;
• RAM: 16 GB;
• VRAM: 8 GB.

4K configuration (60+ FPS, ultra settings):

• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT;
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Intel Core i7-14700K;
• RAM: 16 GB;
• VRAM: 12 GB.

The developers insist the game be installed on an SSD only. Using an HDD will cause serious problems: stutters, delays in texture streaming and missing objects on screen. The official storage requirement is 115 GB, though Steam has reserved 130 GB for preloading.

NVIDIA Technologies and Unreal Engine 5

The PC version of E-Day makes the most of Unreal Engine 5. Owners of NVIDIA GeForce cards will get DLSS 4.5, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and RTX Mega Geometry, a technology that boosts the level of detail of objects involved in shadow and reflection calculations in real time.

A Story Prequel: The Beginning of the End

E-Day takes place 14 years before the events of the first game in the franchise. The story focuses on Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago on Emergence Day (E-Day), when the Locust Horde descended on the planet Sera. The city of Kalona, where most of the action unfolds, is designed as a single seamless location: the developers promised the city will crumble and change before the player’s eyes as they progress through the campaign.

Digital preloading will be available on September 29. E-Day will be the first major release in the series to take advantage of the hardware features of the new gaming graphics cards at launch, so owners of older GPUs should check in advance whether their systems meet the Ray Tracing requirements.