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Perhaps unsurprisingly given its graphical pedigree, Gears of War: E-Day is going to be a relatively challenging game to run on PC, with a lot of SSD space and a modern RT-capable graphics card required. That's according to the game's system requirements, which were revealed today via the game's Steam page ahead of its 6th October release date.
The minimum requirements ask for an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7 6850K or better - processors released eight years ago and ten years ago respectively - plus at least 12GB of system RAM and Windows 10 22H2. In terms of storage, a respectable 130GB is necessary, putting the game firmly into the company of other high-end titles - the only larger games I have installed are Forza Horizon 6 (156GB), Baldur's Gate 3 (145GB) and Path of Exile 2 (142GB). An SSD is also specifically required, suggesting that the game's performance would be hampered running from a spinning rust HDD.
The slightly harder requirement to satisfy is the GPU minimum spec, which is the longest one I've ever seen written out on Steam. According to The Coalition, you'll need an RTX 5050 or RTX 2060 or better, Intel users need at least an A580, and Team Red fans require at least an RX 6600 or RX 9060 GPU. There's a pretty large performance gap between the 2060 and 5050, and the 6600 and 9060, but presumably it's there to reassure people with entry-level current-gen GPUs that the game will be playable. Naturally, all of the GPUs listed have hardware support for ray tracing, which makes sense given the focus on RT lighting via Unreal Engine 5's Lumen.
Moving up to the recommended spec, we're at what I would call the minimum for a "modern" PC: a Ryzen 5600 or Intel Core i5 11600K or better, 16GB of RAM and Windows 11 25H2. The developers have pulled the same trick with the GPU requirements, listing both the RTX 5060 and RTX 3060 Ti for Nvidia users and the RX 6700 XT and RX 9060 XT for AMD owners; Intel Arc fans get the B580 which is also coincidentally the fastest consumer GPU Intel has released.
What do you think of these system requirements - do they feel reasonable? And does this mean that Gears fans on the GTX 1080 Ti (or similar) finally need to upgrade? Let me know in the comments below.