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Developer The Coalition achieved smooth performance for the demanding game Gears of War: E-Day on the Xbox Series S by leveraging the console's solid-state drive. Studio technical director Kate Raynor explained to Digital Foundry that the technique addresses the hardware limitation of the Xbox Series S, which features 10GB of RAM compared to the 16GB found on the Xbox Series X.
Although offloading overflow data from RAM to storage is a common practice, SSD speeds are typically much slower than system memory, often causing significant slowdowns. To bypass this bottleneck on the Series S, The Coalition strategically prioritized keeping constantly needed data in the faster RAM while offloading data that was not required immediately within a frame or a run of frames.
The memory management technique also involved dropping Lumen reflections. While relying on a page file can degrade performance if refreshed too frequently, the method successfully enabled the demanding title to run well on the more affordable console, joining the lineup as a major Xbox exclusive following its early access launch last week.
