Gears of War: E-Day Beta Arrives With a List of Known PC Caveats

The Gears of War: E-Day beta is live, and the development team has published a known-issues document making clear this build is not final software. Crashes, performance dips, latency problems during matchmaking, and lingering accessibility bugs — particularly with narrator — are all acknowledged as works in progress.

What PC players need to know

• Minimum driver versions are enforced: NVIDIA 610.74, AMD 26.6.4, Intel 101.8864. Older NVIDIA drivers will prevent the game from launching entirely.
• OBS users must be on v29.0.0 or newer — earlier versions cause crashes.
• Intel Arc GPUs recompile shaders on every launch, extending start-up times. Arc A580 and B580 owners may see severely reduced performance if Resizable BAR (ReBAR) and Above 4G Decoding are not enabled in BIOS.
• Comodo Antivirus can block game executables and prevent launch; the workaround is to disable it temporarily or whitelist the executables.
• Mismatched Xbox App and Windows Store accounts — signed into each with a different account — will block online play.
• Account linking on Steam Machines does not work for this beta.
• Frame generation is disabled in the beta; the team states it will be enabled in the final game.
• World issues including cover problems, visual popping, and out-of-bounds geometry may be visible.

For players willing to meet the driver and software prerequisites, most obstacles are avoidable — but the beta's rough edges are real, and the team is asking for bug reports through their support portal.