Gears of War: E-Day Shows Heavy CPU Scaling, While Low Core Mode Can Cut Performance

Fresh independent testing from Tom's Hardware finds that Gears of War: E-Day can place an unusually heavy load on the CPU for an Unreal Engine 5 game. Across a 25-processor test pool, the publication observed roughly 80–90% CPU utilization in normal gameplay and clear scaling between processors at 1080p High with a GeForce RTX 5090.

The largest headline comparison in that test has the Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivering 42% higher performance than the Ryzen 5 7600X at 1080p High. That result belongs to Tom's Hardware's specific test configuration and should not be generalized into a universal CPU upgrade percentage: higher resolutions, slower GPUs and heavier graphics presets can move the bottleneck back toward the GPU.

The interesting result is not simply that faster CPUs are faster. Tom's Hardware found signs that E-Day benefits from additional CPU resources beyond the point where many games stop scaling strongly. The Ryzen 9 9900X led the Ryzen 7 9700X by about 3.5% in this workload, while Intel's larger-core-count parts also performed unusually well relative to their normal gaming positions.

The publication measured a performance plateau around 150 FPS in its 1080p CPU-focused setup. At 1440p, the RTX 5090 became the limiting component at roughly 130 FPS for the faster processors, showing why these CPU deltas should not be applied directly to ordinary GPU-limited systems.

E-Day includes a Low Core Mode that says it can improve performance on low-core-count devices and handhelds. In Tom's Hardware's normal four-core-and-up test pool, enabling it instead reduced average performance on all 25 processors, with measured losses ranging from about 12% to 32%. The Core i3-14100, for example, fell from 90.1 FPS to 79.2 FPS, while the Ryzen 7 9800X3D dropped from 168.7 FPS to 133.1 FPS.

That makes Low Core Mode a poor default recommendation for a conventional modern desktop based on this evidence. The test did not cover mobile processors or handheld PCs, however, so its usefulness in the device class explicitly mentioned by the setting remains unproven.

Tom's Hardware interprets the two-core behavior as evidence that Low Core Mode changes E-Day's asset-streaming workload. That explanation fits the observed texture-streaming failures and stalls, but it is an inference from testing rather than a confirmed technical description from The Coalition.

The Coalition's official minimum CPU list starts at older six-core-class processors such as the Ryzen 5 2600X and Core i5-10400, while its Ultra tier lists the Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Core i7-14700K. The new benchmark data adds useful measured context to those requirements without replacing them.

E-Day entered Premium Edition early access on October 1, with the standard release scheduled for October 6. For players troubleshooting unexpectedly low frame rates, the early evidence suggests checking CPU limits as well as GPU utilization, especially at high-refresh 1080p and 1440p settings.

Core Tech Tips would not recommend a CPU purchase from this one benchmark alone. The strongest conclusion is narrower: E-Day shows materially more CPU scaling than many recent Unreal Engine 5 titles in this controlled test, and Low Core Mode should not be assumed to improve a normal desktop simply because its name sounds like an optimization.