Gears of War E-Day requires a ray tracing GPU on PC — GTX 1060 and RX 5000 need not apply

The Coalition has published the full PC requirements for Gears of War E-Day ahead of its October 6 launch, and there's a hard line in the sand: if your GPU doesn't have dedicated ray tracing hardware, the game won't run at all. That cuts off a massive installed base of older cards — the GTX 1060, AMD's RX 5000 series, and anything older — making the RTX 2060 the absolute floor for entry.

At the minimum spec, targeting 1080p at 60fps, you'll need an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 5050, or AMD Radeon RX 6600 with 6GB of VRAM, paired with a CPU like an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel i7-6850K and 12GB of RAM. Stepping up to 1440p 60fps pushes requirements to 8GB VRAM cards — an RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 5060, or RX 6700 XT — while 4K 60fps demands a 12GB RTX 5070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT alongside a Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Intel i7-14700K. Across all presets, RAM tops out at 16GB, which The Coalition notes is consistent regardless of quality tier. A solid-state drive is mandatory, and you'll need 115GB of free space. The game supports Nvidia DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4, and Intel XeSS 3.0T to help hit those frame rate targets, and a built-in benchmark tool lets you dial in settings for your specific hardware.

The ray tracing hardware requirement isn't unprecedented — Indiana Jones and the Great Circle shipped with the same restriction — but it's still a meaningful generational cutoff. The Coalition says it has been iterating on PC stability and performance across a wide range of hardware configurations since July, suggesting the launch build should be in better shape than some recent PC ports. Gears of War E-Day is a prequel set during Emergence Day, the catastrophic first contact between humanity and the Locust Horde on the planet Sera, and it's the first mainline Gears entry in several years.

The game launches October 6 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, and it's available day one on Xbox Game Pass. Recent coverage has also teased a reworked Horde mode with new gore mechanics and, apparently, a Smash Mouth-inspired achievement for players who want to go the extra mile.