Gears of War E-Day is an uncharacteristically CPU-heavy Unreal Engine 5 game

Unreal Engine 5 isn’t particularly heavy on the CPU, but Gears of War E-Day changes that narrative. If you have a monitoring overlay open when you load into the game, you’ll immediately notice your CPU pinned at between 80% and 90% utilization, which is a far cry from most other UE5 titles. Even stranger is that the scaling between CPUs is clear. For instance, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D netted 42% higher performance than the Ryzen 5 7600X at 1080p with the High graphics preset.

We’ve tested a lot of UE5 games with our pool of CPUs to evaluate them, not only for our rankings of the best CPUs for gaming, but also for our ongoing CPU benchmark hierarchy. Most of them haven’t made the cut, simply because of a lack of scaling. …