Gears of War: E-Day PC Benchmarks: RTX 5090 Alone Reaches Native 4K Ultra 60 FPS

Below are the findings, the tech behind them, and what they mean if you're deciding whether to upgrade your GPU or just spend some time in the settings menu.

The tech stack: MegaLights, Lumen, Nanite and Mega Geometry​

E-Day was rebuilt from scratch in Unreal Engine 5. Tom's Hardware calls it the first shipping game to use UE5's MegaLights, which lets artists fill a scene with hundreds of dynamic ray-traced light sources in real time. Reviewer Jeffrey Kampman pointed to emergency-vehicle light bars, flickering TVs and the fluorescent tubes in a wrecked supermarket's frozen-food aisle as the moments where the lighting stood out most.

Other reporting fills in the engine details. Guru3D says the game is built on Unreal Engine 5.8. It uses Lumen for ray-traced lighting and ambient occlusion, while MegaLights handles large numbers of dynamic ray-traced lights. Microsoft's Xbox Wire announcement in July confirmed that the game runs on DirectX 12 with hardware ray tracing. Tom's Hardware notes that ray tracing is required, not optional, which keeps cross-vendor comparisons simpler.

The second headline feature is Nvidia's RTX Mega Geometry. It addresses a long-standing compromise in UE5. As Windows Report explains, current ray-traced Nanite implementations typically use a separate, simplified mesh for acceleration structures. In plain terms, shadows and reflections are traced against a cheaper stand-in for the object you actually see. Mega Geometry lets ray tracing use the full-detail Nanite geometry instead.

This may matter beyond one game. Nvidia says techniques developed for Mega Geometry are expected to be adopted into Microsoft's forthcoming DirectX Raytracing 2.0 specification. If that happens, it would be a Windows graphics platform feature rather than an Nvidia-only extra. That's an expected roadmap, not a shipped standard, so treat it as a direction rather than a promise.

Section summary: E-Day combines MegaLights, Lumen and Nanite on UE 5.8, plus Nvidia's Mega Geometry, which Nvidia says will feed into DXR 2.0.

Presets: Medium is the floor worth keeping​

The game has five quality presets: Low, Medium, High, Ultra and Ludicrous. Tom's Hardware says Ludicrous looks like the counterpart to the "Cinematic" tier in other UE5 games.

Their advice is clear: don't go below Medium if you can help it. Low badly crushes shadows (the reviewer wasn't sure whether that's a bug) and drops a lot of ambient occlusion. The result is a cardboard cut-out look, with car headlights and half-destroyed buildings that lose their natural shading.

Above Medium, the gains are subtler:

• Foliage shadows get softer and more detailed at High and Ultra.
• Some surfaces show more bounce light.
• Textures get slightly sharper.

So Medium keeps most of the visual richness, which helps older and budget hardware.

Ludicrous is a different matter. During the open beta, TweakTown reported a benchmark video from YouTuber Elegant Egotist in which the GeForce RTX 5090, paired with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 CPU, only manages to hit an average frame rate of 44.5 FPS at 4K with upscaling. That was a third-party test of pre-release beta code, not the launch build, but it shows what the top preset is aimed at: hardware that doesn't exist yet.

RTX Mega Geometry: worth about 10%?​

In Tom's Hardware's side-by-side comparisons, Mega Geometry gave "subtle but solid" improvements:

• More natural self-shadowing inside tree canopies
• Better shadows and ambient occlusion on some surfaces
• More accurate shadows from hanging foliage and small objects in rubble piles

The cost was about 10% of performance on the cards they had time to test, and that held fairly steady across GPU generations. The reviewer didn't test every compatible card, so take 10% as a ballpark.

The catch is eligibility. Tom's Hardware says Mega Geometry is technically compatible all the way back to Turing (RTX 20-series), but the game only lets you turn it on with 12GB of VRAM or more. That's a narrower group than Nvidia's marketing suggests. VideoCardz reported that Nvidia says RTX Mega Geometry will work across GeForce RTX GPUs, although performance will naturally depend on the GPU and selected ray-tracing settings. In practice, owners of an 8GB RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 4060 shouldn't expect to see the toggle, at least in the build Tom's Hardware tested.

Upscalers and frame generation​

E-Day supports all three GPU vendors' technologies plus Epic's TSR. Tom's Hardware's image-quality ranking:

Frame generation results:

• DLSS Multi Frame Generation works as expected. Xbox has also confirmed DLSS 4.5 with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and Nvidia Reflex.
• AMD FSR ML Frame Generation runs well on RX 9000 cards.
• On RX 7000 and RX 6000 cards, the frame generation option was greyed out. Tom's Hardware thinks it's a bug or oversight, but nobody has confirmed that or announced a fix.

One more thing for RX 7000 owners: FSR 4 on RDNA 3 has a real cost because those cards lack the dedicated matrix hardware that RDNA 4 has. In the tests, the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, which usually sit near the RX 9070 XT, fell below the RX 9070.

Benchmark results by resolution​

1080p Ultra: RTX 50-series cards had slightly higher average FPS than the Radeon RX 9000 series, but the Radeons had clearly better 1% lows. The reviewer also noticed more hitching than in most recent games, possibly worse on Nvidia, though a variable-refresh-rate monitor hid most of it.

• For a native 1080p Ultra average of around 60 FPS, the minimum current-gen card is an RTX 5060. The RX 9060 XT or RTX 5060 Ti is the more comfortable pick.
• For high refresh rates, the RX 9070 GRE and RTX 5070 do well. Tom's Hardware calls the GRE the value pick, at roughly $300 less than the 5070 at current pricing.
• The RX 9070, RX 9070 XT and RTX 5070 Ti all average over 90 FPS.
• The RTX 3060 misses 60 FPS by a wide margin. It needed 1080p Medium plus DLSS Quality to get past 60 in supplementary testing. Anything slower than an RX 7700 XT or RX 6800 XT is also well short at native Ultra.

1440p Ultra: The RTX 5070 and RX 9070 GRE land just under a 60 FPS average. Tom's Hardware calls them the minimum and suggests upscaling to close the gap, while recommending the RTX 5070 Ti or RX 9070 XT for a smooth experience.

4K Ultra (native): Only the RTX 5090 averages above 60 FPS. The RTX 4090 comes close but misses. Every other card needs upscaling, frame generation or both.

Tom's Hardware also says the game wants a strong CPU and covers that in a separate analysis. A big GPU won't fully make up for an older processor.

A practical tuning plan​

Based on the review's guidance, here's a reasonable order of operations for your own PC:

• Choose a preset based on your GPU tier, and stay at Medium or above.
• Pick your vendor's best upscaler: DLSS on GeForce, FSR 4 on RX 9000/7000, XeSS on RX 6000. Use Quality mode and avoid very low input resolutions, which push more load onto the CPU.
• Check your latency with Nvidia FrameView (works on any vendor's card) or the Nvidia overlay.
• Turn on Reflex on GeForce, or Radeon Anti-Lag in AMD's driver. Tom's Hardware says the game responds well to both.
• Add frame generation last. It raises the displayed frame rate, but it doesn't replace a decent base frame rate.
• Enable Mega Geometry only if you have a GeForce card with 12GB or more of VRAM and about 10% of performance to spare.

On stutter: Xbox says the game supports Advanced Shader Delivery on compatible hardware. ASD ships precompiled shaders with the game to cut load times and first-run shader compilation hitches, starting with the Microsoft Store and the Xbox PC app. Microsoft hasn't listed exactly which hardware and storefronts qualify at launch.

Caveats​

Tom's Hardware's verdict is very positive, calling E-Day a new high-water mark for PC graphics. A few points are worth keeping in mind alongside that:

• Nvidia is the exclusive PC partner, and the feature list reflects it. Even so, the reviewer wanted DLSS Ray Reconstruction added, because the built-in RT denoiser leaves visible boiling in shadows and reflections. The visuals clearly aren't finished.
• Launch-day patches are likely to change some of these results, especially the greyed-out FSR frame generation and the Low-preset shadow problem.
• Hitching was noticeable in the pre-launch build. Whether ASD fixes it on your setup is something to check yourself.

Bottom line​

E-Day is demanding but scales well. An RTX 5060 or RX 9060 XT handles native 1080p Ultra, the RTX 5070 Ti and RX 9070 XT are the cards to have at 1440p, and native 4K belongs to the RTX 5090. Below that, the game's upscaling and frame generation options make it playable on a wide range of hardware without it looking bad.

If you've just benchmarked your own rig, post your results in the forum's gaming and GPU threads.

Update: RTX 5090 averages 34 FPS at native 4K Ludicrous in new testing (October 1, 2026)​

According to DSOGaming’s October 1 report, Premium Edition preorder customers now have access to Gears of War: E-Day, and its early-access benchmark puts the RTX 5090 at just 34 FPS on average, with a 28 FPS minimum, at native 4K using Ludicrous settings and RTX Mega Geometry. This is a different workload from the Ultra results above—not a contradiction—and replaces the earlier beta example with another test of the highest preset.

In DSOGaming’s built-in benchmark testing, DLSS 4.5 Quality raised the average to 56 FPS, with a 49 FPS minimum. Balanced reached a 65 FPS average, although its 57 FPS minimum means it did not maintain 60 FPS throughout. The outlet used a Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory and Nvidia’s 617.14 driver.

According to DSOGaming, adding X2 frame generation to DLSS Quality produced a 104 FPS average and 90 FPS minimum; X4 approached 200 FPS. Those generated frames should not be confused with equivalent native rendering performance or responsiveness. For RTX 5090 owners targeting this preset, these results suggest choosing between more aggressive upscaling and frame generation rather than expecting native 4K/60.

Update: RTX 5070 hands-on testing reports 115 FPS with DLSS assistance (October 2, 2026)​

According to Tom’s Guide’s October 2 hands-on report, an RTX 5070 system delivered roughly 50 FPS at 4K High during gameplay, rising to around 115 FPS after enabling DLSS 4.5 Dynamic Frame Generation and Dynamic Upscaling Quality, with ray-traced shadows, reflections and geometry increased to Ultra. The outlet used a Ryzen 7 9700X and 32GB of RAM across more than 12 hours of play.

These figures do not supersede the native-resolution benchmarks above: they describe different settings and gameplay workloads, and the higher result includes generated frames. Tom’s Guide does not specify the exact upscaling resolution or frame-generation multiplier for its 115 FPS observation, limiting direct comparisons.

According to the same report, semi-open areas brought occasional drops of 15–20 FPS and some pop-in. Switching to 1440p with Performance upscaling and 6x frame generation reportedly pushed displayed frame rates beyond 200 FPS. For RTX 5070 owners, the additional testing suggests considerable tuning headroom, but not native 4K Ultra performance equivalent to those headline frame rates.

Update: Unofficial DLSS 5 test reports visual gains with a performance cost (October 2, 2026)​

According to DSOGaming’s October 2 report, Gears of War: E-Day can reportedly run with DLSS 5 through an unofficial RHI modification, despite lacking native support. The outlet describes improvements to characters and environments in its comparison screenshots. This is a modded rendering test, not an announced addition to the game’s supported graphics options.

According to DSOGaming, its 4K Ludicrous test with DLSS Performance upscaling and X4 Multi Frame Generation delivered 170–190 FPS with DLSS 5, compared with 200–220 FPS without it. The outlet also reports approximately 50 FPS without multi-frame generation. These results do not replace the earlier native-resolution benchmarks: the workload uses different rendering settings, and the higher figures include generated frames.

The practical limitation is significant: according to DSOGaming, its method required disabling Easy Anti-Cheat through the Ultra+ mod so ReShade could work. The report does not establish whether that configuration is permitted or compatible with online play. For Windows players, this therefore remains an unofficial visual experiment with a reported performance penalty—not a supported upgrade or evidence that the game’s existing performance issues have been fixed.