RTX 5090 Defeated by Gears of War: E-Day on ‘Ludicrous’ Settings

Early access testing for the new Gears of War: E-Day shows just how demanding it is, and how useful it will be for benchmarking graphics cards for at least a few generations. In one test at Ludicrous settings with FSR upscaling enabled, an RTX 5090 and Ryzen 9950X3D2 were only able to achieve 44.5fps on average throughout the test.

Gears of War: E-Day isn’t going on sale until Oct. 6, but its Early Access Open Beta is now available. Its system requirements don’t make it clear how demanding a game it actually is, especially at max settings. For “Recommended,” it only demands a Ryzen 5 5600 and Nvidia RTX 5060 or RX 9060 XT. But then again, that’s with upscaling and only at 1440p High settings.

In this benchmarked test, we’re looking at 4K resolution and Ludicrous settings. It looks gorgeous, and you can see how much work the developers have put into making it a realistic, gritty experience. It’s not the urine-yellow of the original Gears of War era, but it’s washed out and grimy.

There are some caveats with the test—such as the YouTube user running AMD’s FSR upscaling, rather than Nvidia DLSS, which is both better than FSR and what Nvidia GPUs are designed to use. This is also a pre-release game, without optimized graphics drivers or the final game polishes and tweaks that will likely make it faster and easier to run. Frame generation will make this easier to run at higher frame rates, too.

Amazingly, the results page suggests that the game was almost as much CPU-bound as it was GPU-bound. An incredible rarity at 4K resolution—especially with the fastest gaming CPU ever made being used. That may suggest the GPU isn’t being used as much as it could be for some reason.

But damn—45fps on a gaming PC that’s basically as fast as you can get in 2026 is a tall order. Clearly, the Ludicrous settings are designed for gaming PCs with all the headroom you could want. It’s impressive, too, that even with such a demanding game, it only uses 9.5GB of VRAM. No one is running this game at these settings on an 8GB card, but they almost could from a VRAM perspective. It did use over 17GB of system memory, though, so make sure you have 32GB if you’re looking to give this game a go.

In a second test, the tester switched to DLSS and Ultra settings and found performance jumped to an average of 67fps, though that put extra load on the CPU.

Look out for Gears of War: E-Day’s full release in October.