Gears of War: E-Day Requires Ray Tracing — GTX Cards Can't Run It
Gears of War: E-Day is playable now. Premium Edition owners got in on October 1, up to five days ahead of the October 6 standard launch, and it is on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from day one.
Before you start the 115 GB download, one line in the requirements matters more than all the others:
Hardware Ray Tracing capable GPU is required.
That is not a quality preset. It is a hard gate, and it locks out a lot of cards that are otherwise fine for a 2026 shooter.
The cards that cannot run it at all
Ray-tracing units arrived with NVIDIA's RTX 20 series, AMD's RX 6000 series and Intel's Arc. Anything older does not have them, however fast it is in conventional terms — a GTX 1080 Ti comfortably outruns an RTX 3050 in raster work and still cannot start this game.
Of the 32 graphics cards we track most closely, 13 are excluded outright:
| Excluded — no ray-tracing hardware |
|---|
| GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660 Super, GTX 1660 |
| GeForce GTX 1650 Super, GTX 1650, GTX 1650 Laptop |
| GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, GTX 1060 3GB, GTX 970, GTX 1050 Ti |
| Radeon RX 580, RX 570 |
| Intel Iris Xe |
The GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Super are still among the most common gaming GPUs in the world. If you own one, this is not a "turn the settings down" situation.
The official requirements — three tiers, all with upscaling
The Coalition published three tiers, not the usual two. Every one of them assumes an upscaler is enabled — DLSS 4.5, FSR 4 or XeSS 3.0. None of these are native-resolution targets, which matters a great deal for the Ultra row.
| Minimum | Recommended | Ultra | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Target | 1080p · 60 FPS · Medium | 1440p · 60 FPS · High | 4K · 60 FPS · Ultra |
| GPU | RTX 5050 / RTX 2060 / RX 6600 / RX 9060 | RTX 5060 / RTX 3060 Ti / RX 6700 XT / RX 9060 XT | RTX 5070 Ti / RX 7900 XT |
| CPU | Ryzen 5 2600X / Core i7-6850K / i5-10400 | Ryzen 5 5600 / Core i5-11600K | Ryzen 7 7800X3D / Core i7-14700K |
| RAM | 12 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB |
| Storage | 115 GB, SSD required | 115 GB, SSD required | 115 GB, SSD required |
Sources: Steam for the minimum and recommended tiers, and The Coalition's final PC specs (18 September) for the Ultra tier, which the Steam page does not list.
If you saw Intel Arc cards named in either tier, that was the June reveal. The final specs list NVIDIA and AMD only. Arc cards are not excluded — every Arc GPU has ray-tracing hardware and the game runs — they are simply not the cards the publisher chose to name, so we place them by performance below.
Two details worth pulling out. The minimum asks for 12 GB of RAM — an unusual number, and 8 GB is under the floor. And the SSD requirement is stated outright rather than implied: this is a Nanite-and-Lumen Unreal Engine 5 game streaming assets continuously, and a mechanical drive is not a slow option here so much as a broken one.
Where your graphics card lands
Ranked against the cards The Coalition names for each tier. These are tier placements, not frame-rate predictions — a card in the Recommended band is one the publisher's own spec puts at or above the recommended hardware, with upscaling on.
Ultra — 4K · 60 · Ultra RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 4090, RX 7900 XTX, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 4080, RX 7900 XT, RX 9070 XT
Recommended — 1440p · 60 · High RTX 5070, RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4070 Super, RX 7800 XT, RX 6800, RTX 4070, RTX 5060 Ti, RTX 3080, RX 7700 XT, RTX 5060, RTX 4060 Ti, RTX 3070, RX 6700 XT, Arc B580, RTX 3060 Ti
Minimum — 1080p · 60 · Medium RTX 4060, RX 7600, Arc A770, RX 6600 XT, Arc A750, Arc B570, RX 6600, Arc A580, RTX 4060 Laptop, RTX 3060, RTX 2070, RTX 4050 Laptop, RTX 2060, RTX 3060 Laptop
Below the minimum (has ray tracing, but under the spec) RTX 3050, RTX 3050 Laptop, RX 6500 XT, Radeon 780M
One card is placed against our own ranking. The RX 9070 XT sits in Ultra even though our table scores it a hair below the RX 7900 XT that The Coalition names there. Those scores are weighted towards conventional rasterisation, and RDNA 4 is the generation where AMD's ray-tracing performance moved. In a game that will not let you switch ray tracing off, the 9070 XT is the faster of the two, and the score is what needs fixing.
For a per-GPU estimate on your exact card, use the checker on our Gears of War: E-Day requirements page. For measured results rather than estimates, Tom's Hardware has tested 43 GPUs and 25 CPUs.
It is unusually CPU-heavy
This is what makes E-Day different from most Unreal Engine 5 games, and it changes the buying advice.
Tom's Hardware benchmarked 25 processors and found the game pins the CPU at 80–90% utilisation, calling it "an uncharacteristically CPU-heavy Unreal Engine 5 game". Even the fastest gaming CPU on the market reaches full utilisation at 1080p, and there is a wide spread between chips — X3D parts pull meaningfully ahead of mainstream six-cores.
Two practical consequences. The Ultra tier names a Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Core i7-14700K, which is a much heavier CPU ask than most games put beside an RTX 5070 Ti. And if you are upgrading specifically for this game and already own a strong GPU, the processor deserves at least as much of the budget.
Settings: what to change first
E-Day ships with an unusually complete upscaling lineup — DLSS 4.5 (Super Resolution, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and Reflex), AMD FSR 4, Intel XeSS 3.0 and Unreal Engine's own TSR. Whatever you own, something applies. The official tiers already assume you are using one.
- Check whether you are CPU-limited before you touch anything. This is the first step for this game specifically. If your frame rate barely moves when you drop the resolution or switch upscaling to Performance, the processor is the bottleneck and no graphics setting will help — upscaling reduces GPU work, and you do not have a GPU problem.
- If you are GPU-limited, set upscaling first. At 1440p and above it is the largest single gain, and modern upscalers at Quality are close enough to native that the trade is nearly free.
- Ray-traced global illumination is the heaviest graphics setting. Lumen GI and MegaLights — the latter handling up to 100 distinct light sources — are where the frame time goes. You cannot disable ray tracing, but lowering its quality tier is the biggest step down.
- Frame generation is for smoothness, not responsiveness. Dynamic Multi Frame Generation raises displayed frame rate without lowering input latency. Use it to turn 60 into something fluid; do not use it to rescue 30. Leave Reflex on either way.
- If you are near the 12 GB RAM minimum, close everything else first. A 115 GB streaming-heavy UE5 title on a 12 GB system has no headroom.
The short version
RTX 20-series or newer, RX 6000-series or newer, or an Intel Arc card: find your tier above, and watch your CPU as much as your GPU. A GTX card of any generation, an RX 500 or RX 5000 series card, or Intel integrated graphics: this is the game that ends that card's run.
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