Gears of War: E-Day on PC shuts the door on GPUs without ray tracing

The Coalition has published the official PC requirements for Gears of War: E-Day just weeks ahead of its launch, scheduled for next month, and there is one detail that is going to sting for quite a few people: the game will not run on graphics cards that lack dedicated ray tracing hardware. According to GameSpot, this rules out GPUs as widespread as Nvidia's GTX 1060 or AMD's entire RX 5000 family, and makes the RTX 2060 the absolute minimum threshold to get into the game.

Why does it matter? Because this is not a graphics setting you can lower in the menu, but a generational lockout: if your card predates the RTX era or the Radeon cards with ray acceleration, it does not matter how much CPU or memory you have. The upside is that, according to the same source, 16 GB of RAM is enough on every graphics preset, something to be thankful for with memory prices currently through the roof.

What you need to know

• Ray tracing is mandatory: graphics cards without dedicated ray tracing hardware are not supported. It is neither optional nor something you can turn off.
• RTX 2060 as the floor: it is the most basic card on which The Coalition guarantees the game will run. GTX 1060, RX 5000 and similar cards are out.
• 16 GB of RAM for everything: no matter which preset you choose, system memory requirements do not go above that figure, according to GameSpot.
• Recent precedent: this is not the first title to do it; GameSpot cites Indiana Jones and the Great Circle as a clear example of the same decision.
• Optimization work: The Coalition says it has kept iterating on stability and performance across a wide range of PC configurations since July.

What changes and who is affected

The decision is not a marketing whim. When an engine is designed with ray-traced lighting as a pillar rather than an extra, maintaining an alternative path through classic rasterization means doubling the work, testing and bugs. The Coalition has chosen the same route MachineGames took with Indiana Jones: assume the 2026 install base has already made the leap and build only for it. It is a bet that simplifies development and, in theory, allows modern hardware to be pushed harder.

The problem is who gets left behind. The GTX 1060 was for years the most popular graphics card in the world on PC, and AMD's RX 5000 cards are still very common in mid-range rigs built just a few years ago. All of those players, even with a decent processor and their 16 GB of RAM, are going to find that E-Day simply will not launch. And we are not talking about playing at 4K with everything maxed out, but about being able to play at all.

The good within the bad

The fact that the RAM requirement does not scale with the preset is genuinely good news. At a time when adding memory costs a fortune, knowing you do not have to move up to 32 GB to touch the high settings is a real relief. On top of that, the studio having spent since July polishing performance across many different configurations suggests that, at least for those who meet the minimum, the experience should be reasonably stable at launch. We will have to see for ourselves next month.

Our take

At Underworld Lordz we understand the technical logic, but we do not like how this kind of cutoff is becoming normalized. It is one thing for a game to look better with ray tracing, and quite another for a lighting requirement to decide who can and cannot play. For our community, with members spread across the Americas and Europe and very different budgets, a GTX 1060 or an RX 5700 are not relics: they are the PCs of plenty of people who are still competing and creating content with them every week. Shutting them out of a Gears game, a series that was always about mass multiplayer, is a decision that comes at a cost in players.

From a competitive standpoint, there is another, less obvious angle. If ray tracing is non-negotiable, the performance floor rises for everyone, and in versus modes that means the gap between someone playing on an RTX 2060 and someone with a high-end card could translate into very different frame rates. We hope The Coalition delivers serious performance presets, with the option to drop ray tracing quality to the minimum, rather than a configuration designed only to show off in trailers. Those of us who play for the rankings want stable frames before pretty reflections.

For content creators the math is similar: recording, streaming and playing at the same time on a mid-range card was already tight, and now the bar goes up with no alternative. If the promise of optimization since July is real, great. If it is not, we will see plenty of stuttering streams on the first weekend.

What do you think?

Maybe you have just enough GPU to get in, maybe a GTX 10 series card has left you out, or maybe you think it was about time to leave hardware without ray tracing behind. Do you think it is reasonable for a game to require ray tracing just to launch, or is The Coalition leaving too many people behind? Tell us in the team chat or on our Discord.