Gears of War: E-Day on the Steam Machine: Playable, With Some Odd Scaling

▶Watch on YouTube

There are some oddities with Gears of War: E-Day on the Steam Machine. Switching between 1080p, 1440p and 4K, or between Medium, High and Ultra, doesn't always change performance or scale the way you'd think it would. I know there's some CPU bottlenecking going on, and I'd assume there are driver issues too, maybe from the forced ray tracing features that you can't fully turn off. Even so, it's definitely more than playable here.

What I tested

• Fullscreen 1440p
• Upscaling: FSR Balanced
• Unlimited frame rate, V-Sync off
• Started on a custom High setup, then moved to custom medium
• 8GB VRAM

I blew the overlay up on the left side of the screen so it's easier to see, which means the picture might not line up perfectly. With the custom High settings I was at 45 to 48 FPS.

How the presets scale at 1440p

Same spot, sitting still with no combat, everything else the same:

• Low: 54 to 57 FPS
• Medium: 46 to 49 FPS
• High: 42 to 44 FPS
• Ultra: about 33 FPS, in the 20s or 30 to 40 in combat depending on the area

Custom medium settings

I mostly ended up on a custom medium setup: the Medium preset with a few things turned down.

• Reflections: Low
• Ray traced geometry: Low
• Ray traced shadows: Low
• Motion blur left on, though I'd normally turn it off
• Everything else left at the preset

At 1440p FSR Balanced that comes out around 53 FPS sitting still. There's plenty of room to adjust from there.

Resolution and upscaling

• 1440p FSR Native: around 31 FPS, and it doesn't hold together well in other areas
• 1080p native: around 45 FPS
• 1080p FSR Quality: around 58 to 60 FPS, though from what I've seen in gameplay it sinks into the 50s and sometimes the 40s even there

It doesn't seem to be running quite how I'd expect on the Steam Machine, so hopefully fixes and patches come. For gameplay, I went back to 1440p FSR Balanced with the custom medium settings.

Verdict

Gears of War: E-Day isn't verified for the Steam Machine right now, and I think it'll need some updates to get there. Still, it's playable and decent enough, and for the most part you can set it up to run between 40 and 60 FPS depending on the area. I'll keep an eye out for updates that make the scaling more consistent, and if that happens I'll do an updated test.