By Gears of War: E-Day didn’t run very well on the Steam Deck, but the Steam Machine is a very different story. It plays well here, though the way it responds to its graphics settings is pretty strange, and I’m still not quite sure what’s going on under the hood.
Settings that barely change anything
No matter what I changed, performance barely moved. I tried all sorts of configurations, including forcing the graphics settings on the Steam Machine itself, and saw no more than a few frames per second difference between low and high resolutions or between the medium and high presets. Normally stepping between 4K, 1440p and 1080p makes a drastic difference to FPS, even in a game with forced ray tracing like this one.
At 1440p on the medium preset, toggling FSR Balanced on and off made around 3 to 5 FPS difference at best, and even that could have come down to how many enemies were on screen. Here I was sitting at around 40 to 50 FPS, bouncing around a lot of the time. Dropping to 1080p with the high preset and FSR on Quality gave pretty much exactly the same result, and side by side you’d struggle to tell that image apart from the 1440p FSR Balanced one. Motion blur also annoyingly turns itself back on whenever you pick a preset, even after switching it off.
4K, input latency and hidden frame generation
Things got even weirder when I pushed it up to 4K with FSR Quality and the medium/high presets. The FPS hardly changed at all and the image just looked a little cleaner. What did change was input latency, which was noticeably worse at 4K. That makes me wonder whether the game is using some kind of built-in frame generation to make up the difference and hide the true FPS.
The high preset also added a bit of extra input latency over medium, without any visible difference on the FPS counter or in the graphics, so I ended up going back to medium. Frame generation is best left off entirely, as it makes the input latency absolutely miserable.
Best settings: 1440p medium
Gears of War: E-Day definitely needs some optimisation, but 1440p on the medium preset with FSR is a great place to be playing on the Steam Machine, giving around 40 to 50 FPS with the best-feeling responsiveness.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer runs at the same 40 to 50 FPS, but I didn’t have a good time there either, and not because of performance. Right now it feels like a shotgun free-for-all: whoever spots the other player with a shotgun first wins, with people flicking between cover and landing shotgun kills at surprising range before you can line up a shot with any other weapon.
Final thoughts
Gears of War: E-Day is perfectly playable on the Steam Machine, even if its settings behave oddly. Stick to 1440p medium, skip frame generation, and you’ll get a solid 40 to 50 FPS. Let us know in the comments if you’re playing through Gears of War: E-Day and where you’ll be playing it.
