Gears of War: E-Day is a back-to-basics entry for the third-person shooter series, serving as a grounded prequel to the numbered Gears entries. But from a technical perspective, it's one of the most cutting-edge games around, implementing brand-new Unreal Engine 5 rendering technologies co-developed with Epic. We recently had a chance to visit The Coalition's offices in Vancouver to get a behind-the-scenes look at the game's tech and speak to key members of the game's technical staff, who provided insight into the game's industry-leading visuals.
The headlining technology in E-Day is MegaLights, Unreal Engine 5's ray-traced direct lighting solution that complements Lumen's indirect lighting tech. Traditional rasterised shadowmaps impose strict limits on shadow-casting sources due to performance costs, but MegaLights bypasses these constraints. It employs a fixed budget of lighting samples per pixel, allowing thousands (!) of dynamic, shadow-casting lights - such as street lamps, muzzle flashes and emergency vehicle lights - to operate simultaneously without crippling performance.
To maintain a 60fps target on modern consoles, The Coalition optimised MegaLights extensively alongside Epic Games. After all, its initial showing in 2024 ran on a PS5 at a 1080p 30fps target. The team more than doubled the system's execution speed, while keeping quality in a good place. Furthermore, on high-end Nvidia PC hardware, the game leverages Mega Geometry to ray trace against full-detail Nanite meshes, resulting in highly detailed self-shadowing and reflections - at a modest cost of around 1-2GB of VRAM and around a seven percent drop in performance. The same tech is part of the Microsoft DXR standard, so AMD and Intel implementations ought to be forthcoming.
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After starting as a hybrid title that used both hardware and software Lumen, depending on platform, E-Day at launch relies entirely on hardware-accelerated Lumen for global illumination and reflections across all target platforms. The decision to drop software Lumen simplified the rendering pipeline while enabling precise ray-traced reflections on complex surfaces, such as curved mirrors. Diffuse ray traced global illumination provides accurate multi-bounce lighting across the game's areas, defining its core graphical aesthetic.
Character rendering receives a significant upgrade through Nanite skinning, allowing high-poly character models to run without traditional Level of Detail (LOD) swaps using the same tech as Nanite terrain. Main characters feature over 300,000 triangles alongside custom facial rigs, expanded morph targets, and hand-sculpted strand hair. Dynamic gore, blood, and dirt accumulation systems are integrated directly into the character shaders to enhance combat realism and fit Gears' gritty vibe.
Environmental interaction is enhanced via advanced destruction systems and motion matching locomotion. Dynamic cover sheds debris, glass fractures realistically along impact lines and GPU-accelerated particle physics handle complex debris interactions. Meanwhile, motion matching, a tech pioneered by the likes of For Honor and The Last of Us Part 2, queries an extensive database of animations in real time, delivering responsive smooth transitions across complex movement chains like clambering and vaulting.
On Xbox Series X, the game offers 60fps performance (~936p), 40fps balanced (~1000p) and 30fps quality (~1152p) visual modes, using TSR upscaling to preserve image clarity. While linear levels run consistently well, larger open-ended environments can exhibit occasional CPU-bound frame-time spikes during rapid traversal. Displays supporting 120Hz and VRR help smooth out these performance dips, though the day one patch may come with a small performance boost as well.
Targeting the Xbox Series S presented unique memory constraints due to the console’s limited RAM. To compensate, The Coalition worked with Xbox engineers to create an extended memory architecture that pages inactive data directly to the NVMe SSD. While performance on Series S requires visual feature concessions- such as simplified global illumination and reduced reflection details - the custom streaming architecture keeps the game functional on the platform. Resolutions are lower here too, at ~576p in performance mode, ~648p in balanced mode and ~792p in quality mode, again with TSR upscaling. Performance is generally worse than on Series X, with frequent frame-rate drops at 60fps, though again 120Hz VRR displays can smooth out most of this and the other modes are more stable. Concerningly, Series S seems to suffer from brief pauses at times, which can stretch for close to a second, though these were infrequent.
Ultimately, Gears of War: E-Day serves as a landmark showcase for Unreal Engine 5's expanding capabilities, developed alongside the engine in a way that allowed experimental features to become core engine capabilities. By bringing complex ray-traced lighting, Nanite character skinning and advanced geometry management to mainstream consoles, The Coalition has created one of the best-looking Unreal titles ever, beyond even what was shown in early previews. Performance remains rocky in more open segments, especially on Series S, and hopefully some of these issues can be overcome in time. Regardless, it's exciting stuff, and this technical bedrock should leave the company in good stead as the next generation approaches.