The Coalition rebuilt Gears of War: E-Day in Unreal Engine 5, making it one of the first games to ship with Unreal Engine 5’s MegaLights and Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry. MegaLights lets artists light a space with hundreds of dynamic ray-traced light sources in real time, and Mega Geometry efficiently ray-traces complex foliage meshes. The game offers five quality presets, and the author suggests Medium is the lowest playable setting, as Low can crush shadows and lose ambient occlusion, creating a cardboard cut-out look. RTX Mega Geometry is compatible with Turing GPUs but is only enabled on cards with 12GB of VRAM or more, which wasn't common before the RTX 40-series. Performance costs for Mega Geometry are roughly 10% across tested generations. Upscaling options include DLSS, FSR, XeSS, and Epic's TSR. DLSS offers the sharpest and most stable image quality, while FSR 4 on RX 9000 and RX 7000 series cards looks great but slightly less stable on fine details. Fallback FSR on RX 6000-series cards shows visible surface boiling and crawling when the player is at rest.

The author notes that DLSS’s advantages at low input resolutions are less important in E-Day than in other titles like Control Resonant, because the game does not encourage standing around to appreciate the graphics. The game is refreshingly vendor-inclusive with upscaling and frame generation technologies. The author suggests that for the best image quality, Mega Geometry should be enabled, but it can be turned off for better performance without significant visual loss. The author also notes that the game is not one where you are standing around and appreciating pretty trees too much.