The Coalition turned the Xbox Series S SSD into additional memory for Gears of War: E-Day

A technological approach that helps solve performance issues on a weaker console.

The Coalition studio revealed how they managed to optimize Gears of War: E-Day for Xbox Series S, despite the console's noticeably weaker hardware configuration. The developers found an unusual use for the built-in SSD — part of its space is effectively used as an additional memory layer, which allowed the game to avoid a significant reduction in graphics quality.

The main problem with the Xbox Series S is primarily the amount of RAM. The console has 10 GB of RAM, while the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 each have 16 GB. At the same time, Microsoft requires that games released for Xbox Series X also run on Series S, so developers have to find ways to adapt resource-intensive projects to a weaker system.

In the case of Gears of War: E-Day, The Coalition decided to use the SSD as a kind of RAM extension. The studio's technical director, Kate Rayner, spoke about this in an interview with Digital Foundry.

Typically, game data is distributed across several memory levels. A small amount of information is stored in the extremely fast processor cache, larger arrays in RAM, and even more data can be on the SSD. The further the data is from the processor, the longer it takes to retrieve it.

The Coalition leveraged this hierarchy to their advantage. The developers placed part of the detailed data of the in-game city on the SSD, which does not necessarily need to be constantly kept in RAM. When the game requires a certain set of data, it is transferred from the drive to RAM.

Since SSDs are significantly slower than RAM, developers couldn't just transfer any data there. The team selected those memory elements whose access could be performed on the fly without a noticeable impact on performance. As a result, using several gigabytes of SSD space allowed for approximately 1 GB of additional available system memory.

According to Rayner, this approach helped The Coalition avoid a significant degradation in the quality of Gears of War: E-Day on Xbox Series S. The only noticeable graphical limitation that had to be made for stable 60 frames per second was disabling Lumen-based reflections.

The developer noted that the solution allowed them not to “significantly reduce the quality of the game,” and other teams have already shown interest in this technology. Therefore, a similar approach could potentially be used in future projects for Xbox Series S, especially as developers face increasing memory requirements.