(Image credit: Future | The Coalition)

It's no secret that 2026 has been a bit of a disasterclass for Xbox, with new leadership clearly feeling the time is right for a brutal clearout of employees and studios. In light of those decisions, it's quite a spicy time for Gears of War: E-Day to finally come out – a game that The Coalition made instead of finishing its new trilogy (Gears 4 and 5), itself quite a big change in plans.

Rather than finding out what'll happen to Kait and her team in the future timeline, we're instead rewinding right to the start and returning to the objectively massive boots of Marcus Fenix. E-Day, as the name suggests, shows off what the actual invasion of the Locust Horde looked like to live through, and it's unsurprisingly gritty as a result.

In gameplay terms, things are also pretty old-school. While there are sequences that let you explore a little, they're far from the vehicle-driven open zones of Gears 5, and the running and gunning also feel impressively Xbox 360-coded (although they're actually a lot quicker than they used to be).

What's taken me aback, though, is how unbelievably good the game looks, playing on PC. I have a loan PC from Nvidia, kitted out with an GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, and it's pretty amazing to see E-Day push it to its limits, or at least exploring those limits. Playing at 1440p (my preferred avenue, for performance reasons), I've been able to play the game on its Ultra preset, with a few extra settings like hair strands toggled on, all at a pretty steady 60fps.

That performance has been rock solid while the game pushes out frankly gorgeous lighting and reflections – with the pre-release work between developers The Coalition and Nvidia to get this all working so smoothly seeming obvious. The fact that game-ready drivers for Nvidia cards were there on release day is all you really need to know on that front.

The game's opening sequences are played out largely in night-time scenes and dimly-lit interiors, giving it the perfect opportunity to show off ray-tracing's more subtle side. It's not all about shiny cars reflecting the world perfectly; the interactions of different light sources on a scene are just as important, and can often be more impactful.

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(Image credit: Future | The Coalition)

(Image credit: Future | The Coalition)

(Image credit: Future | The Coalition)

(Image credit: Future | The Coalition)

(Image credit: Future | The Coalition)

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Nvidia's crowing about the new feature that E-Day debuts on this front: the catchily titled RTX Mega Geometry. This basically marks a big step forward in how geometry in a level interacts with lighting – and it means that objects in a scene have a noticeable step up in lighting detail and shadowing.

You might not think it makes a huge difference, and in some ways you'll be fine to play without it, but if your card's capable of it, this is the sort of less shouty step that makes a real difference to a game's sense of reality, moreso than something like DLSS 5.

Of course, much of the fun of benchmarking a game when you have a 50-series card to play with is in figuring out where the ceiling is with frame generation enabled. With so many levels of the tech now available to use, it's about finding the right balance for you.

I've been playing with frame-gen largely turned off, but turning it on at all can bring huge rewards in terms of frames – and the first couple of levels really don't introduce enough latency to feel like they have much downside. Crank it up to the maximum, and you'll get hundreds of frames per second, although input lag might start to weigh on you a tiny bit.

Having that headroom to play with at all is pretty great, though, and leaves E-Day feeling like a really polished PC launch. In fact, its visual quality and launch day parity has me feeling (once again) good about selling my Xbox Series X a few years ago. It was a machine I didn't use enough, and getting this sort of massive Xbox release on PC right from the start underlines that I still don't need one.