The Coalition used the SSD on Xbox Series S as makeshift RAM to help Gears of War E-Day run smoothly on it
Other game teams are reportedly already interested in learning the method, it says
Gears of War: E-Day studio The Coalition has revealed how it used the SSD storage on the Xbox Series S as makeshift RAM to get the game running smoothly on Xbox’s lower-spec console.
Because the Xbox Series S has 10 GB of RAM (compared to 16 GB on Xbox Series X and PS5), some studios have had issues getting their games to run smoothly on the console.
Given that Microsoft insists that any game made for Xbox Series X also needs to be able to run on Xbox Series S, some developers have struggled to get their games running well on the comparatively underpowered console.
What’s more, the console doesn’t have access to upscaling tech like Nvidia‘s DLSS or AMD’s FSR, meaning it can’t solve the problem by rendering at a lower resolution and upscaling with that (like Switch 2 can do with DLSS).
In a new interview with Digital Foundry, The Coalition technical director Kate Rayner explained that the studio got around these limitations by tapping into the console’s built-in SSD storage.
The explanation given was data storage usually has a hierachy in games – a CPU cache can only hold a tiny amount of data but is extremely fast, RAM can hold more storage and is relatively fast, and SSDs can hold a large amount of storage but are much slower.
The idea is that if a game’s active data can’t be stored in the CPU then it’ll be held in RAM instead, and if it can’t be held in RAM it’ll go to the SSD, with the understanding that it will take the game longer to access that data with each step down.
The Coalition’s solution is to use the internal SSD in the Xbox Series S to also act as RAM, in order to hold the game’s detailed city data in storage. When the game needs to access certain memory, it’ll be moved from the SSD into the system RAM.
Because the SSD is much slower than RAM, however, the team specifically picked certain parts of memory that wouldn’t slow the game down if it had to be moved from the SSD to system RAM on the fly.
The result is that a couple of gigabytes of DDS storage can add around a gigabyte of usable system memory to the Xbox Series S, resulting in a game that still performs well on the console, with only Lumens-based reflections removed to maintain 60 frames per second.
Rayner told the publication that the technique made sure The Coalition could avoid “really lowering the quality of the game”, and that other game teams are already interested in learning how to replicate it, meaning it could be used again in future Xbox Series S games to improve performance.
VGC’s Gears of War: E-Day review called it “an absolute blast, even if it focuses on commotion over emotion”, adding: “Gears of War E-Day’s campaign offers balls-to-the-wall action and rarely lets up, but that means the story takes more of a back seat than I’d like.
“It’s good that time is given to the backstories of new protagonists Mags and Lucas, but given that the game is literally the playable Marcus and Dom backstory fans have been waiting decades to see, more time could have been spent on their relationship. In terms of pure gunplay, however, very little beats it this year.”
