Gears of War: E-Day puts Unreal Engine 5 lighting tech to work on PC

Tom's Hardware's test makes the game a clear early benchmark for UE5 lighting and upscaling options on a wide range of GPUs.

Tom's Hardware’s testing says Gears of War: E-Day is the first shipping game to use Unreal Engine 5’s MegaLights and one of the first to ship with Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry, making it a useful showcase for new real-time lighting and ray-tracing tech. The game was rebuilt by The Coalition in Unreal Engine 5, and the reviewer measured performance across 43 graphics cards. E-Day includes Low, Medium, High, Ultra, and Ludicrous presets, and the review suggests Medium is the lowest setting worth using because Low sharply hurts shadowing and ambient occlusion. RTX Mega Geometry improves self-shadowing and some other shadow detail, but it is only available in-game on GPUs with at least 12GB of VRAM and cost about 10% performance in the cards tested. The game also supports DLSS, FSR, XeSS, and Epic’s TSR, with DLSS judged the best-looking option and older FSR support on RX 6000 cards described as much worse.