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Gears of War: E-Day studio finds a way to get more performance from Xbox Series S - one that other Xbox games could probably use

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Gears of War: E-Day studio finds a way to get more performance from Xbox Series S - one that other Xbox games could probably use

As a first-party Xbox title, Gears of War: E-Day is under pressure to look good and run well on Xbox consoles. This is especially challenging to do on Series S, due to the console's limited computing power compared to Series X. But developer The Coalition has discovered a clever way of circumventing the Series S' limited memory pool.

Gears of War: E-Day has densely-detailed environments that require a lot of system memory (RAM), which is a struggle for Xbox Series S' 10GB of GDDR6 RAM. The Coalition's solution was to offload some of that data onto the console's ultra-fast NVMe SSD storage drive. Digital Foundry reported on the tech behind it, which was co-developed by Xbox's Advanced Technology Group.

For some context, NVMe SSD drives are made up of RAM modules of their own, so they can act as additional RAM when needed. As fast as they are, however, NVMe drives aren't quite as fast as proper RAM, so The Coalition essentially used the NVMe as a second tier of RAM to help the game's engine stream assets more smoothly. The game then swaps what's needed in the present moment to RAM, and then sends it back to the NVMe when it's not actively being used.

"The benefit is that, in exchange for a couple of gigabytes of storage on the SSD, you can gain about a gigabyte of usable system memory," Digital Foundry's report explained. And, the system is smart enough to cherry-pick chunks of data that won't be heavily impacted by being moved to the slower memory.


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