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- Playable and fairly decent on the Z2 Extreme, with a custom medium setup at 1080p FSR Performance.
- That keeps me at 40 FPS and above at 25W. 35W adds about 4 or 5 FPS.
- No frame gen right now: only FSR4 is offered, and this hardware doesn't support it.
- Dropping to 900p only gains a few FPS. The benchmark runs worse than actual gameplay.
Gears of War: E-Day runs fairly decently on the ROG Xbox Ally X, and you can adjust graphics, resolution and upscaling to get it where you want. The forced ray tracing features do hit this chip, and there's one big limitation: no frame gen. The game only offers FSR4, not an FSR3 version, and the Z2 Extreme doesn't support FSR4, so frame generation isn't available here.
What I tested
- Xbox mode
- Steam version (early access); I'll be testing the Game Pass version too
- 1080p fullscreen, V-Sync off
- Upscaling: FSR4 Performance
- 25W and 35W, 8GB VRAM
- Started on the Medium preset, then my custom settings below
Custom settings
What I landed on is the Medium preset with a few things turned down:
- Geometry: Low
- Reflections, ray traced geometry and ray traced shadows: Low
- Global illumination left alone
- Motion blur left on (you could turn it off), film grain off
- Everything else on Medium, with room to turn more down
For the most part that keeps me at 40 FPS and above, which has felt fine for this game on the Xbox Ally X.
Performance: 25W vs 35W
I checked 25W vs 35W in the benchmark first, and whether there's much of a difference depends on where you're at. The benchmark is actually harder to run than the game itself. It reminds me of Forza Horizon 6, where you get a lot better performance in game than in the benchmark. It's a nice way to compare things, but not a great way to dial in your settings for this one.
In actual gameplay, going from 25W to 35W gains about 4 or 5 FPS. In the spot I tested, the overlay read 39 FPS at 25W and 47 FPS at 35W. That's why I mostly focused on 35W, but 25, 30 or 35 all work.
Lower resolution
900p with the same settings on Performance only gains a few FPS. 900p with FSR Quality comes in about 3 FPS under 1080p Performance. So you can lower the resolution, but there's only so much to gain, and I stuck with 1080p FSR Performance, especially at 35W.
Verdict
Any game with forced ray tracing hits this chip hard, and Gears of War: E-Day is no exception. The G3 Extreme runs it much better; I'm running high and ultra on that one. On the Xbox Ally X it's more limited, but very playable in my opinion: 1080p FSR Performance with custom medium settings keeps it around 40 FPS and up, and you can adjust from there to gain a little here or there.
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