Gears of War: E-Day Goes Gold, Ships PC Specs That Require Ray-Tracing Hardware
The Coalition confirmed Gears of War: E-Day has gone gold, and its PC requirements make a ray-tracing GPU and a solid-state drive mandatory at every tier.
Gears of War: E-Day has gone gold. The Coalition confirmed the milestone on September 17 alongside a full breakdown of pre-install and launch timing, plus the complete PC specification sheet for the October 6 release, and the headline detail for PC players is that a hardware ray-tracing capable GPU is no longer optional at any settings tier.
The Countdown to October 6
Pre-install opens September 29 at 8am PT (3pm UTC) on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam, so the roughly 115GB install can finish before anyone needs to play. Premium Edition owners get Early Access on October 1 at the same time, five days ahead of the worldwide launch on October 6. The game is a day-one addition to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on top of its standard and premium purchase tiers, detailed on the official Gears of War site.
Ray Tracing Moves From Feature to Requirement
The listed minimum specification, confirmed on Gears of War: E-Day's Steam page, asks for a Ryzen 5 2600X or Core i7-6850K/i5-10400 processor, 12GB of RAM and a GPU with hardware ray tracing support: an RTX 5050, RTX 2060, Radeon RX 6600 or Radeon RX 9060. That last line is the notable one. The Coalition has built ray-traced reflections, shadows and global illumination into E-Day's base rendering path rather than treating them as an optional toggle, which rules out several still-common GPU generations that lack dedicated ray-tracing hardware. Storage carries its own hard requirement too: the listing specifies a solid-state drive for the full 115GB install, not just a recommendation.
What Recommended and Above Looks Like
Stepping up to the recommended tier calls for a Ryzen 5 5600 or Core i5-11600K, 16GB of RAM and an RTX 5060, RTX 3060 Ti, Radeon RX 6700 XT or Radeon RX 9060 XT, aimed at 1440p at 60 frames per second on high settings. Xbox Wire's own PC features rundown adds NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4 and Intel XeSS 3.0 as supported upscalers, along with a built-in benchmark tool, HDR and ultrawide monitor support, and an advanced settings menu for players tuning ray-tracing quality against frame rate on their own hardware.
The Studio's Own Read on the Milestone
Going gold means the build is locked and ready for manufacturing and certification, the last major checkpoint before a console launch. It also caps a run that started with the game's reveal and carried through this year's beta tests on Xbox and Steam. The Standard Edition lists for $69.99 with the Premium Edition at $99.99, and both editions are outlined on the Steam pre-purchase page alongside the bonuses tied to each.
Campaign, Horde and Versus Land Together
E-Day ships its full mode lineup at launch rather than staggering content afterward. The campaign supports one to four players online, with two-player split-screen available on console; Horde returns as a four-player squad mode built around a class system; and Versus covers 4v4 ranked and social playlists. Running all three at once, across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam, is part of why The Coalition pushed the PC specification sheet out this early: server-heavy modes like Horde and Versus put sustained load on a machine in a way a single-player campaign section does not, and the studio wants players' rigs sorted before the Early Access window opens.
Why It Matters for Players Building a PC Around the Launch
With pre-install landing in under two weeks, anyone planning to play at launch now has a concrete shopping list rather than a rough guess. The ray-tracing floor also signals where The Coalition expects the PC audience to sit going into 2027: this is one of the first big Xbox Game Studios releases to treat a ray-tracing capable card as a baseline rather than a high-end perk, a line other Unreal Engine 5 shooters are likely to follow as consoles and mid-range GPUs both catch up. Full patch and requirement updates, if any arrive before October 6, will post through the same Xbox.com game page and Steam listing.
“Reaching gold is an important milestone for the studio. More importantly, it means we're one step closer to players experiencing Emergence Day for themselves.”Mike Crump, Studio Head, The Coalition
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Lena tests the hardware that games run on, from handheld thermals to controller latency. If a spec sheet is doing something suspicious, she has already opened the device.
