The FPS Review Weekender: Gears of War: E-Day Is the Rare Unreal Engine 5 Game That Actually Wants More CPU Cores, Plus 10 More Hardware Reviews

[David_Schroth]

Gears of War: E-Day landed this week and did something we almost never see from Unreal Engine 5: it pinned CPUs and scaled cleanly with core count. That makes it as much a CPU story as a GPU one. Elsewhere, The Witcher 3 Remastered gave benchmarkers some very strange scaling to chew on, and the […]

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[Peter_Brosdahl]

Cool to know about E-Day. Not my kind of game, but good to know that someone finally put in the effort. I almost want to get it just to see it give the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX in my laptop or 5800X3D/9800XD rigs a workout.

 

[DrezKill]

Gears 4 and 5 were good examples of how to use Unreal Engine 4 (although Gears 5 was, and still is, buggy as all f*ck), and I bet E-Day will finally show us a good implementation of UE5.

 

[DrezKill]

Some more E-Day shiznit I saw around:

Advanced Shader Delivery Adds Nvidia GPU Support Later This Month To Banish Shader Compilation Stutter

Huge #StutterStruggle news.

www.digitalfoundry.net

Gears of War: E-Day's PC Version Promises New Tech, Huge Scalability and the End of Shader Compilation Stutter

We spoke to Epic, Nvidia and the Windows team about a tentpole project for Microsoft.

www.digitalfoundry.net

Inside Gears of War: E-Day: How The Coalition and Epic Pushed Console Visuals To New Heights

Unreal Engine 5 MegaLights, Nanite skinning and much more at 60fps on console.

www.digitalfoundry.net

Related video:

How Gears of War: E-Day Solves the Series S Memory Issue by Tapping the SSD

A blueprint for future Xbox development?

www.digitalfoundry.net

 

[DrezKill]

Gears of War: E-Day Handheld Performance Review

Gears of War: E-Day takes us fourteen years before the original Gears of War, to the night the Locust Horde erupted from the ground across Sera initiating the bloody Locust War. The game is developed by The Coalition in Unreal Engine 5, and our handheld performance review evaluates how it...

www.techpowerup.com

Steam Deck:
"As soon as you start playing, you'll notice that Gears of War: E-Day is yet another high-profile AAA game that isn't playable on the Deck. This time, it's the CPU that's too feeble—we were CPU-limited even after dropping every setting to its lowest value and using the Ultra Performance TSR preset.

In general, you can expect the frame rate to hover around the mid-20s, with constant hitches and frequent drops below 20 FPS. So don't try playing this one on the Deck, unless you plan to stream it locally or via GeForce NOW."

And for their Steam Deck Optimized Settings section they said: "As we've already said, Gears of War: E-Day isn't playable on the Deck even when you switch everything to Low and set upscaling to Ultra Performance. The game is simply too CPU-heavy for the Deck's ancient low-wattage 4-core processor to deliver anything close to a stable 30 FPS."

ROG [Xbox] Ally X:
"The game supports Advanced Shader Delivery on AMD GPUs, but the catch is that you need the Xbox app installed on your PC along with driver 26.7.1 for it to work, which came out at the end of July and isn't present on any of our AMD handhelds. So while we didn't have to wait for shaders to compile on our RX 9070 XT-powered desktop PC, things were different on handhelds."

"Now for some good news. Despite Gears of War: E-Day being quite CPU-demanding and featuring always-on ray tracing, we managed to run the game on each handheld at 1080p/1200p with upscaling at more-than-playable frame rates. The Claw 8 EX mostly averaged between 40 and 50 FPS with an occasional drop to the high 30s, and the Xbox Ally X averaged about 45 FPS, also with dips to the high 30s. The other two Windows handhelds averaged about 40 FPS with dips to the mid and low 30s. That's a pretty solid result all things considered."

Hilarious cuz on the Steam store page for the game it says "Fully optimized for handheld play on Steam Deck, Xbox Ally X, and Xbox Ally devices".