While Gears of War: E-Day is a beautiful game, it’s incredibly demanding, whether you’re playing it on the Xbox Series X or on PC. But, The Coalition was able to work some magic on the Xbox Series S by tapping into the SSD to increase performance.
The Coalition’s studio technical director Kate Raynor talked to Digital Foundry and described tapping into the SSD while the Series S was out of memory. That’s important for a game as demanding as Gears of War: E-Day, as the Xbox Series S only has 10GB of RAM, rather than the 16GB on the Series X.
Offloading data from the RAM to an SSD is nothing new. Your computer does it all the time when you run out of memory. What happens then is that the computer relies on the Page File, a dedicated block of storage on your SSD or hard drive that’s used to hold overflow data. The problem with relying on that typically, though, is that SSDs are way slower than RAM, which is why your computer slows to a halt whenever it has to lean on the Page File.
The key for Gears of War: E-Day, then, was strategically choosing which data to offload to the SSD, and which data to keep in the faster system memory. According to Digital Foundry, The Coalition got around this by prioritizing data that wasn’t used “in a frame or over a run of frames,” while data that’s constantly needed stays in RAM.
This approach does have its limits, though, and will degrade performance over time if the page file is refreshed into memory too often – as that does have a performance cost on its own. But, with this memory trick and dropping Lumen reflections, The Coalition was able to get Gears of War: E-Day running pretty well on the Xbox Series S. Hopefully, more developers are able to adopt this approach going forward, because I have a feeling that the cheaper hardware in the Xbox Series X is going to be more necessary as the RAM crisis carries on.
Gears of War: E-Day launched last week into early access, and has some pretty big changes over past games. But, still, The Coalition is proud that Gears of War: E-Day is now one of Xbox’s main exclusives.
