The Coalition has confirmed that Gears of War: E-Day has gone gold, which means the prequel is finished, submitted and locked with just under three weeks to go before anyone gets their hands on it. Studio head Mike Crump shared the milestone on Xbox Wire on Thursday, alongside two pieces of information players have been waiting on for months: exactly when pre-installs open, and exactly what the PC version will ask of your hardware.
“Reaching gold is an important milestone for the studio,” the announcement reads. “More importantly, it means we're one step closer to players experiencing Emergence Day for themselves.”
Going gold is not the same thing as being done — a day-one patch is effectively guaranteed on a game this size — but it does mean the disc image is final and the risk of a late slip has essentially gone to zero. For a series that has already had E-Day sitting in the calendar since its 2024 reveal, that is worth something.
Pre-install opens September 29
Pre-loading begins on September 29 at 8am Pacific (15:00 UTC) across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam. That applies whether you have pre-ordered or you are coming in through a subscription, and given the download size — more on that below — it is not the sort of thing you want to leave until the morning of.
From there the rollout splits three ways. Premium Edition owners get in up to five days early, starting October 1 at 8am Pacific (15:00 UTC). Everybody else who has bought the game plays from October 6 at the same hour, and Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass members join on that same worldwide launch day. The Premium Edition runs $99.99 and bundles the base game, the early access window, the Bravo Squad Signature Weapon Pack, five seasonal customisation packs beginning with the Emergence Pack, and 1,000 Iron, the game's premium currency. The standard edition is $69.99.
The full PC specification sheet
This is the part PC players have been circling. The Coalition published a three-tier table — Minimum, Recommended and Ultra — and the headline from it is not a number at all: a hardware ray-tracing capable GPU is required. Cards without dedicated ray-tracing support are not supported at any preset. An SSD is mandatory too, and the install is 115 GB no matter which tier you are targeting.
Minimum targets the Medium preset at 1080p and 60 FPS with upscaling enabled, and asks for an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 or RTX 2060, or an AMD Radeon RX 6600 or RX 9060, paired with a Ryzen 5 2600X, Core i7-6850K or Core i5-10400. You will want 6 GB of VRAM and 12 GB of system memory, on Windows 10 64-bit (22H2).
Recommended moves to the High preset at 1440p and 60+ FPS on an RTX 5060 or RTX 3060 Ti, or a Radeon RX 6700 XT or RX 9060 XT, with a Ryzen 5 5600 or Core i5-11600K behind it. That tier wants 8 GB of VRAM, 16 GB of RAM and Windows 11 (25H2) or newer.
Ultra is where 4K at 60+ FPS lives, and it is a genuinely high bar: an RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 7900 XT, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Core i7-14700K, 12 GB of VRAM and 16 GB of system memory.
What the PC build actually ships with
Alongside the tiers, The Coalition listed the PC feature set. All three major upscalers are in — NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4 and Intel XeSS 3.0, with TSR as the vendor-neutral fallback. Ray tracing covers reflections, shadows and global illumination rather than a single showpiece effect. There is a built-in benchmark mode with advanced settings exposed, and HDR and ultrawide monitor support are both listed as standard.
The studio also notes that PC stability and performance work has continued since July's multiplayer open beta, which is a reasonable thing to say and an unfalsifiable one until launch day. What is measurable is that the spec sheet has not quietly crept upward since the beta — the minimum tier is still aimed at hardware several generations old, provided that hardware can do ray tracing.
What you are pre-installing
E-Day is a prequel set fourteen years before the original Gears of War, putting Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago on the ground during the Locust Horde's first eruption. The campaign can be played solo, in two-player split-screen on console, or with up to four players online. Horde returns as Horde Siege, built around larger maps, multiple squads working shared objectives and four classes — Assault, Marksman, Medic and Breacher. Versus is back at 4v4 across Ranked and Social playlists, with modernised movement layered onto the series' cover shooting.
The whole thing is built in Unreal Engine 5 and targets 4K at up to 60 FPS on console across both campaign and multiplayer. Gears of War: E-Day launches October 6 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam, and is in Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on day one.
