Key information
Unlike most Unreal Engine 5 titles that are relatively light on the CPU, Gears of War E-Day places an uncharacteristically heavy burden on processor hardware. Testing with an RTX 5090 Founders Edition at 1080p using the High graphics preset revealed that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D achieved 42% higher performance than the Ryzen 5 7600X, while easily pushing top-tier chips to full utilization. The game's demanding nature remains consistent throughout the opening hours regardless of scene complexity.
Performance scaling is heavily influenced by core count and specific chip architectures. The title scales past six or eight cores, showing strength with AMD's X3D processors as well as Intel's Raptor Lake and Arrow Lake stacks, though it plateaus around 150 FPS. When tested at 1440p, performance becomes largely GPU-bound near a 130 FPS ceiling for comparable product families, though weaker CPUs still exhibit clear scaling differences at the higher resolution.
The game includes a 'Low Core Mode' option in the System menu designed to assist low core count devices and handhelds. Testing on a dual-core Core i3-14100 setup showed that turning this mode on resolved asset streaming breakdowns and menu freezing while improving performance by 30%. However, for modern processors with at least six cores, enabling Low Core Mode universally lowers performance across the board.
