Gears of War: E-Day PC specs revealed — RTX 2060 minimum on Unreal Engine 5

Gears of War: E-Day launches October 6, 2026 on Xbox Series X/S, Steam, and Game Pass Day One — and its PC requirements are notably modest for a game built entirely on Unreal Engine 5. The minimum GPU is an RTX 2060, a card released back in 2018, alongside just 12 GB of RAM. That matters because almost every other UE5 title has shipped with requirements that left mid-range PC owners out in the cold.

The specs

The full requirements, now live on Steam, break down like this:

Minimum — RTX 2060, RTX 5050, AMD RX 6600, or Intel Arc A580; six-core CPU (Ryzen 5 2600X, i7-6850K, or i5-10400); 12 GB RAM; 130 GB SSD; Windows 10 64-bit; DirectX 12.

Recommended — RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 5060, RX 6700 XT, or Intel Arc B580; Ryzen 5 5600 or i5-11600K; 16 GB RAM; same 130 GB SSD; Windows 11 64-bit.

Every GPU on the list supports ray tracing — and that's deliberate. The Coalition rebuilt E-Day entirely from scratch on UE5, using the engine's MegaLights system to push real-time ray-traced lighting throughout the campaign. Upscaling (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) and frame generation are described as critical to hitting smooth frame rates at minimum spec, per TechSpot. The studio's tech director confirmed a literal "empty hard drive" rebuild — no assets carried over from previous entries.

What to watch

The 130 GB SSD requirement is the real bottleneck for most players, not the GPU. HDDs are explicitly unsupported. If your rig is a few years old, check storage before you check the graphics card.

On the platform side, E-Day is an Xbox and PC exclusive — PlayStation 5 is out, confirmed by Xbox's Asha Sharma at the June 2026 Xbox Games Showcase, as reported by Engadget. Game Pass Day One access applies to both console and PC, which undercuts the likely £50–60 / $70 retail price significantly if you're already subscribed.

Story-wise, E-Day is set 14 years before the original Gears of War — covering the first hours of the Locust invasion, when 25 percent of the planet's population was wiped out in just 26 hours. Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago return, voiced again by John DiMaggio and Carlos Ferro.

If The Coalition pulls this off at the specs they've published, it would be one of the better-optimized UE5 launches to date — a low bar to clear, but a meaningful one.