Gears of War: E-Day Streams Assets at 3.7 GB/s and Cuts RAM Use by 2 GB

Gears of War: E-Day sustains an average SSD read rate above 1 GB/s and peaks at 3.7 GB/s, according to Tom's Hardware testing — figures no previously tested game has approached. The developer, The Coalition, treats the NVMe SSD as an extension of system memory. The technique saves roughly 2 GB of RAM on any NVMe drive, regardless of PCIe generation.

The numbers deserve scrutiny, and the testers applied it. Task Manager polls too slowly for accurate measurement. The team therefore used HWInfo with a 20-millisecond polling period across all graphics presets at 4K with DLSS Quality enabled.

What did the bandwidth measurements show?

The measured throughput scaled directly with the graphics preset on a desktop test system:

• Ludicrous: 3.7 GB/s peak, 1.3 GB/s average
• Ultra: 2.8 GB/s peak, 1.2 GB/s average
• High: 2.5 GB/s peak, 1.05 GB/s average
• Medium: 1.5 GB/s peak, 824 MB/s average
• Low: 858 MB/s peak, 359 MB/s average

The comparison baseline matters here. No previously tested SSD-heavy game sustained 1 GB/s on average. The prior record was 366 MB/s, recorded in Forspoken at 4K with maximum settings. Many titles stayed below 100 MB/s. Some games showed brief peaks, but those spikes lasted milliseconds. Sustained throughput is the metric that counts, and E-Day delivers it constantly.

How does the technology work?

The Coalition explained the mechanics in an interview with Digital Foundry. The studio leveraged the Xbox Series S's fast SSD to bring a dense game world to a memory-limited console. The game dynamically loads and offloads complex city data in real time, streaming assets just in time for each scene.

Digital Foundry credits the real achievement to data management, not raw speed. The team uses advanced heuristics to decide which assets to fetch and when. Overuse would harm frame rates, so the system swaps data only when the swap benefits the experience. That tuning is the difference between clever engineering and a stutter generator.

The game also supports DirectStorage. The testers note, based on prior testing, that DirectStorage support alone does not guarantee high SSD activity or read rates. Support on paper is not the same as utilization in practice.

Is the technique active on PC?

A YouTuber, Mostly Positive Reviews, first reported unusually high SSD activity in Task Manager while playing, in a post on X. Tom's Hardware then investigated independently. The bandwidth figures above confirm the storage technology ships in the PC version, not only on Xbox.

What hardware ran the tests?

The desktop configuration paired an MSI GeForce RTX 5090 Vanguard SOC with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 64 GB of DDR5-6000 memory (2x32 GB G.SKILL Flare X5 at 6200 MHz CL30). Storage covered four generations: a Crucial T700 PCIe Gen5, a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus-G Gen4, an ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro Gen3, and a Samsung 870 EVO SATA III. The board was an ASUS ROG Strix B850-F, the cooler a Corsair Nautilus 360 RS, and the OS Windows 11 26H2 build 26300.9711 with NVIDIA driver 617.42 and HAGS enabled.

The laptop represented mainstream hardware: an RTX 4060 mobile GPU, Core i7-13620H, 16 GB DDR5, an internal PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD, and the same Samsung 870 EVO SATA drive for comparison. The OS and driver matched the desktop.

How much RAM does it actually save?

On the 64 GB desktop system, installing the game on any NVMe SSD saved about 2 GB of system memory. The Gen5, Gen4, and Gen3 drives produced the same saving. That result suggests the threshold is the NVMe interface and its command path, not sequential bandwidth beyond a floor. The testers did not isolate where that floor sits.

The visual cost of a SATA drive is real. The game's average read rate exceeds what SATA can deliver, and the consequences showed. Textures loaded slowly and reduced image quality in one comparison. Lighting and shadows took time to appear in another. Everything eventually loaded, but immersion suffered in the interim.

Does the SSD choice change performance?

On the resource-rich desktop, no. A SATA SSD produced no measurable performance impact. The visual degradation was the only drawback.

The 16 GB laptop told a different story. Average frame rates stayed virtually identical between the NVMe and SATA drives. The 1% lows diverged, especially at higher presets, with the NVMe SSD delivering smoother frame times and a more fluid experience. The storage technology demonstrably helps where memory is scarce, and does nothing measurable where it is abundant.

Will other developers copy this approach?

The concept is not new, and the testers say so plainly. Windows already pages data to disk through virtual memory when physical RAM runs out. What The Coalition added is game-specific tuning, ensuring paged-out data reads back without noticeable slowdown. Testing confirmed the RAM saving works on any NVMe installation and that near-instant asset loading follows.

The commercial context sharpens the question. RAM prices are climbing, and many players run 16 GB or even 8 GB systems. For studios building visually dense worlds, fast storage may offer a practical route to preserve their vision on modest hardware. Whether other developers adopt the technique will depend on whether the tuning effort justifies the wider addressable audience.