THE CRUNCH
Gears of War E-Day is an uncharacteristically CPU-heavy Unreal Engine 5 game. Benchmarking by Tom's Hardware shows the title pins CPU utilisation at 80-90% when an overlay is active, a far cry from most other Unreal Engine 5 titles. The game also demonstrates clear performance scaling between different processors, with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivering 42% higher performance than the Ryzen 5 7600X at 1080p with the High graphics preset. The heavy CPU burden was consistent throughout the opening hours of the game, regardless of scene complexity or interactions.
The testing setup used an RTX 5090 Founders Edition at 1080p to isolate CPU differences, with the game requiring a specific Game Ready driver to launch. Tom's Hardware found that the game's built-in benchmark does not perfectly match in-game performance, likely due to its sweeping camera angle drawing more assets than players typically see. The publication settled on an in-game scene for testing, using the High preset as a compromise that shows near-maximum scaling without being an unreasonable test case. At the Ultra preset, the scaling between CPUs jumps to nearly 29%, whereas the Ludicrous preset reduces the difference to just 6.8% between the 9800X3D and 9600X.
The results show that core count matters more than usual in E-Day. While the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 7800X3D occupy the top spots, the 12-core Ryzen 9 models generally underperform their 8-core counterparts in games. Here, the 7900X and 7700X are in lockstep, while the 9900X is only 3.5% ahead. Intel's Arrow Lake chips also behave unusually, with the Core Ultra 7 265K leading the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus by about 2%, a reversal of their typical performance order. The publication notes that performance plateaus around 150 FPS at 1080p, with 1440p tests showing the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is about 18% faster than the Core i5-14400 at that resolution, but the scaling gap widens to 36% at 1080p.