Gears of War: E-Day PC specs are out — and you'll need an SSD and a ray-tracing GPU
Gears of War: E-Day has gone gold, and The Coalition has published the full PC system requirements ahead of the game's October 6, 2026 release. Every configuration demands an SSD and a GPU with hardware ray-tracing support — a bar that locks out a significant chunk of pre-2020 gaming hardware. The game launches day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass at no extra cost.
The hardware floor
The minimum spec targets 1080p at 60 fps on medium settings — with upscaling enabled. Even then, you'll need at least an RTX 2060 or an RX 6600, both of which require DirectX 12 Ultimate support, per Xbox Wire (official). The recommended setup for 1440p60 calls for an RTX 5060 or RX 6700 XT, and 4K Ultra demands an RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT. All specs assume upscaling — DLSS 4.5, FSR 4, or Intel XeSS — is running. A mandatory 130 GB SSD installation rounds out every tier, as TweakTown notes, correcting the 115 GB figure that appeared in earlier listings.
Gears of War: E-Day PC system requirements — all tiers mandate an SSD and a DirectX 12 Ultimate GPU.
On the visual side, E-Day brings ray-traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination, plus HDR and ultrawide monitor support. There's also a built-in benchmark tool with granular settings — useful for dialing in performance before launch day.
What Game Pass changes for buyers
At $69.99 for the Standard Edition and $99.99 for Premium, E-Day sits at the current AAA price ceiling. The Premium Edition adds cosmetics and in-game currency but no extra story content — and it grants five days of early access from October 1. Pre-downloads open September 29, giving you time to free up that SSD space before the weekend.
For Game Pass subscribers, the day-one inclusion makes the retail price largely irrelevant. The calculus shifts to whether your current hardware can actually run it: the RTX 2060 minimum blocks anyone still on GTX 10- or 16-series cards, and the mandatory ray-tracing requirement has no fallback path.
The game itself
E-Day is a prequel set 20 years before the original Gears of War, centered on Emergence Day — the moment the Locust horde erupted from underground across the planet Sera and decimated its cities. Marcus Fenix returns, with voice actors John DiMaggio and Carlos Ferro reprising their roles. The campaign runs 10–12 hours, with several multiplayer modes alongside it. Every asset was built from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, with particular attention to lighting and shadow detail.
