Gears of War: E-Day FPS Optimization & Full Breakdown Comparison

This is the full breakdown of Gears of War: E-Day performance and image quality across 26 graphics settings. The sections run from the most impactful settings to the least impactful, with Preset first.

While the game looks pretty good, there’s tons of ray tracing noise visible in lighting, especially close-up, and it seems to be something you’re not able to change that much, which is a little bit of a letdown, however the game still looks and plays great - Assuming your hardware is powerful enough to run it.

Preset

Even with upscaling, the performance of this game really can tank sometimes. There’s quite a big jump in performance between Ludacris and Ultra, as well as medium and low on my system with a 5080. I assume most of the performance is lost due to costly ray tracing effects that seem to be out of our control.

Most of the changes between ludicrous and high are small changes to lighting in the environment and shadows. Jump between high and medium is much more drastic where tons of global illumination is lost, and finally down to low, where even more is lost, and even entire light sources.

Upscaling (Native)

This game doesn’t have the option to disable upscaling entirely, however there are four different options, all of which we can use with native upscaling for a minimal performance impact compared to true native with a basically free quality boost. The difference between all of these is basically nothing in terms of visual and performance. That being said, my lows did seem a little better using methods other than DLSS.

Upscaling (DLSS)

Upscaling it does tap you quite nicely up in performance as long as you’re GPU limited. On my system I had to raise the quality to ludicrous in order to actually see a performance difference between each of these upscaling options, and even so it smooths out on the lower end. There’s definitely a noticeable jump each step down and of course you should set this based on your system’s performance.

At 2K, you’ll have no issue playing with the quality, maybe even at 1080p. However, at 4K, you can comfortably drop to balanced for a sizable performance boost. Unfortunately, the rest of the options only gain you so much, so you’ll likely need to resort to upscaling for even more performance.

Global Illumination

Global illumination is the option that has the most performance impact and most of that comes between a ludicrous and ultra, whereas everything else sits at roughly the same performance with run-to-run variants.

There’s minimal impacts on visuals with GI So on higher powered system I’d recommend choosing ultra and nothing higher otherwise medium.

Ray Tracing Geometry

Ray tracing geometry has the next biggest impact on performance. And besides the stability improvements dropping from ludicrous to ultra, the real performance boost comes from high to medium, and based on performance with minimal visual change, I’d recommend choosing medium at highest here.

Subsurface Scattering

Subsurface scattering is a super subtle effect, mainly supposed to be seen on skin, and even so I can barely see a change at anything other than ludicrous. The effect doesn’t have that much performance impact and can comfortably be left on high or above on higher powered systems. Ludicrous will cost you more performance for basically no visual impact.

Detail Objects

Detail objects, add tons of small bullet casings, boxes, and trash to the scene, making things feel a lot more fought in, and all of those are removed when you set this two off. The game feels much more alive with this turned on, and on my system, it adds around 9% to the VRAM usage from 5.5 to 5.9GB - Assuming you’re not running out of VRAM and you’ve got a little bit of performance to spare, I’d highly recommend enabling this as it’ll make the game feel a lot more alive.

RTX Mega Geometry

RTX Mega Geometry is supposed to group things together and make them a bit more performant. However, on my system it raised from 5.6 to 6.8GB of VRAM and had a surprising performance cost. I would recommend leaving this off on most systems. Visuals-wise, there’s almost no change.

Sunlight Shadows

Sunlight only appears in the second act and above. However, the steps between these, as you expect, make shadows more and more sharp the higher you go up. At ultra and above, shadows are superlegible, and highs are low, there’s quite big, drastic steps in blurring shadows. For the most part, to set this to High or Medium for a performance boost, otherwise, ludicrous is fine.

Cosmetics

Cosmetics is supposed to lower the quality of scratches and damage to cars and things like that. However, on my system, I didn’t see a real change between these performance-wise. So you could probably leave this on high and forget about it.

Animation Quality

Animation quality is hard to gauge, especially with screenshots, but throughout all of these options, besides run-to-run variants and an odd hitch at medium, things are about the same across the board in terms of how animations look in cutscenes or in general movement, and I assume this to only have a big impact on super CPU-limited systems.

Reflections

Reflections has quite a big visual impact with very little performance impact, except for ludicrous, where stability is terrible. If you can, for the most part, I’d recommend playing on Ultra. I assume Ludicrous has to do with ray tracing and things like that, and every step below high looks about the same. So ultra is where I would leave this.

Geometry

Geometry has a very subtle impact on objects in the scene and mostly has to do with the amount of VRAM used between ludicrous and low in this scene there’s only about 200 megabytes difference, however, in others it might be a lot larger. Performance-wise, you shouldn’t see a difference between these unless you’re seriously VRAM constrained. In this particular scene, most of the visual impact came between low and any option above it.

Volumetric Fog

Volumetric fog, while it appears in lots of places, the quality selected for this doesn’t have that much impact both on VRAM and performance on everything other than Ludicrous. I’d recommend choosing Ultra at highest here.

Gore Quality

Gore quality is hard to gauge in screenshots and even in video. There’s lots of gore no matter what you choose. Exempt lowering this does lower the amount of it during attacks and things like that. Performance-wise, I didn’t see any change here. I assume maybe on super CPU-limited systems you’ll see more of a difference.

Variable Rate Shading

This one’s supposed to improve your performance when it’s turned on, However, on my system throughout general gameplay, I didn’t see too much of a difference. I would recommend leaving this on.

Ray Traced Shadadows

Ray traced Shadows has surprisingly little visual change other than lighting differences between medium and low and like the very small visual impact the performance impact on my system was small other than the jump to ludicrous where stability was terrible. Have the set to ultra at highest.

Postprocessing

Post-processing effects bloom, blur, and other visual effects like that throughout general gameplay, you’re not likely to notice a difference. However, having this option set higher does result in a slightly better looking game, so I would recommend choosing Ultra or Ludicrous if you can.

Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic aberration turns off that red-blue split as well as some lens effects near the edges of your screen. I would recommend leaving this on, however, if you don’t like the effect, you can turn it off here.

Motion Blur

Motion blur is entirely your preference, and each step that you move down seems to slightly lower the amount of motion blur and doesn’t really have anything to do with quality other than a small possible performance boost by disabling this, it all comes down to personal preference.

Effects

Effects has an incredibly small visual impact and performance-wise, there’s basically no change. Leave this on ultra and forget about it unless during combat and certain sequences, FPS drops dramatically, in which case lower this.

Textures

Textures should have no impact on performance, and on my system it didn’t. The only thing it does impact is the amount of VRAM your game uses, and between 5.4 and 5.9 gigabytes of VRAM used between low and ludicrous, as long as you’ve got more than around 8 gigs, you can comfortably raise this all the way up to ludicrous and enjoy a slightly better looking game, especially on 4K displays.

Film Grain

Film grain is incredibly subtle throughout most scenes, but is most visible on far away flat colors like buildings here and shouldn’t translate that well to compressed video or images. This is more of a preference thing and when it’s turned on it can result in video encoders working slightly harder, possibly using more storage space, resulting in slightly better looking video.

Destruction

Destruction was hard to test and objectively compare; Throughout scripted sequences, I didn’t see too many differences between these, but I would assume higher options result in more detailed destruction of terrain, particles, and things like that.

Depth of Field

Depth of field only rarely appears during cutscenes and having a blow adding more depth does add a ton to cutscenes and I’d recommend keeping it wherever possible.

Hair Strands

Hair strands surprisingly has more of an impact on people with little to no hair, making it super weird and flowy or bubbly like ray tracing is losing it. I would recommend playing with this option turned off just about always for much better looking hair, even though lighting is slightly less detailed. It’s much more worthwhile having more stable-looking hair than weird hair that swims and moves.