Gears of War E-Day PC Reaction + The Coalition's Console-Equivalent Settings

Summary

The discussion reviews the PC version of Gears of War: E-Day, focusing on its visuals, performance, and technical features.

Story and atmosphere

The game revisits the darker tone of the original Gears games. It opens during the first moments of Emergence Day, with the first mission taking place mostly at night before the characters reach a bridge. Chapter 2 moves into outdoor environments.

Visuals and HDR

The speakers praise the HDR presentation, especially its deep shadows and convincing bright lights in the opening night scenes. They also highlight detailed environments, minimal visible level-of-detail pop-in, and reactive destruction.

A previously noted issue—bullets passing through stacked freezer glass without breaking the panels behind it—has been fixed.

Gameplay

The movement changes are described as a strong improvement. The new jump button takes some getting used to, while cover play and powerful gunfire feel satisfying. The game also plays well with a keyboard and mouse, and supports ultrawide displays throughout menus and cinematics.

PC performance and tips

• On a high-end PC, the reviewer played at maximum settings with dynamic DLSS and frame generation, reaching close to 165 fps on a 165 Hz monitor. Enabling V-Sync in the Nvidia control panel helped dynamic frame generation match the display’s refresh rate.
• Without frame generation, the same PC generally ran at around 60–80 fps.
• In the Horde beta, an RTX 4060 at 1440p with DLSS Performance mode reportedly reached about 60 fps. Large open areas, including Horde and parts of Act 2, can be CPU-heavy.
• Console-equivalent settings are described as roughly Ultra for Quality mode. The spoken figure for Performance mode is unclear in the subtitles.

Caveats and technical notes

Occasional stutters during traversal and transitions from cutscenes to gameplay remain, including on consoles. They do not appear to be shader-compilation stutters, though the initial shader-compilation step is lengthy.

The Coalition also uses a system to address unusually heavy ray-tracing workloads in certain corridor layouts. SSD paging helps expand the Xbox Series S’s usable memory.

People and sources featured

John and Rich discuss the PC version. Oliver visited The Coalition and produced review coverage, while Alex is mentioned in relation to stuttering and benchmark discussions.

Other sources and organizations mentioned include The Coalition, Microsoft, Nvidia, Digital Foundry, and TechPowerUp.