Gears of War: E-Day GPU Tests Show RTX 3060 Needs Upscaling, 4K Ultra Pushes Past Most GPUs

Tom's Hardware has published independent Gears of War: E-Day testing across 43 graphics cards, adding measured GPU context to the game's October 1 early-access release. The results show a demanding ray-traced Unreal Engine 5.8 workload: at native 1080p Ultra, the GeForce RTX 3060 falls well short of a 60 FPS average, while the publication found that current-generation cards around the RTX 5060 or Radeon RX 9060 XT class are a more realistic starting point for roughly 60 FPS at that preset.

These are Tom's Hardware measurements from its own test system, not Core Tech Tips benchmarks and not universal performance guarantees. E-Day is also unusually CPU-heavy, so GPU deltas can compress when the processor becomes the limiting component.

The RTX 3060 is especially useful as a mainstream reference point. Tom's Hardware found that simply dropping the game to native Low was not enough to cross 60 FPS in its test, and Low also produced a large visible reduction in shadowing and ambient occlusion. Moving instead to Medium with DLSS Quality pushed the card above a 60 FPS average while preserving substantially more of the game's lighting presentation.

That does not mean every RTX 3060 system will hold 60 FPS. CPU performance, scene complexity, driver version, memory configuration and background load can all move the result. The useful conclusion is narrower: in this test, reconstruction plus a moderate preset was more effective than relying on the lowest native preset alone.

At 2560×1440 Ultra, Tom's Hardware found the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 GRE just short of a 60 FPS average, with the RTX 5070 Ti and RX 9070 XT providing stronger headroom. At native 4K Ultra, only the RTX 5090 crossed 60 FPS on average; the RTX 4090 came close but remained below that threshold.

That makes upscaling and frame generation part of the realistic 4K tuning path rather than optional extras for most hardware. E-Day exposes DLSS, FSR and XeSS technologies on compatible GPUs, but generated-frame output should not be confused with the underlying rendered frame rate or with an equivalent reduction in input latency.

E-Day also exposes NVIDIA RTX Mega Geometry as a toggle on supported GeForce hardware with at least 12 GB of VRAM. In Tom's Hardware's visual comparisons, enabling it produced subtler but visible improvements to self-shadowing in foliage and to shadows or ambient occlusion around fine geometric detail such as rubble.

On the subset of compatible cards the publication tested for the toggle, Mega Geometry cost roughly 10% performance. That figure should not be generalized to every GPU or scene because the article explicitly did not benchmark the feature across the entire compatible card set.

Core Tech Tips separately covered Tom's Hardware's 25-CPU analysis and the game's Low Core Mode behavior. This GPU analysis owns a different practical intent: what graphics-card class is required at native 1080p, 1440p and 4K, what an RTX 3060 can do with tuned settings, and what RTX Mega Geometry costs in the tested subset.

Together the two datasets point to the same broader constraint from different directions: E-Day can stress both sides of a gaming PC. A GPU upgrade will not automatically remove a CPU ceiling at high frame rates, while a fast CPU does not make native 4K Ultra inexpensive to render.