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. The system uses “advanced heuristics” to decide which data to move to the NVMe, by analysing access patterns. “Frequently used data stays in RAM, and anything idle can move to the SSD,” the report added.

Whether future Xbox games could use similar technology to increase performance on Xbox Series S is of course the big question, especially as large-world games GTA 6 and Fable approach. But though the execution may be unique to Gears of War: E-Day, the idea of swapping data between slow and fast memory isn’t entirely new: Mac devices, for instance, are especially good at doing this. Yet as the current console generation ages, clever solutions will be needed to keep up with demands of triple-A games, especially as this generation may last longer than initially intended thanks to ongoing memory shortages.

Incidentally, The Coalition also invested in other engine upgrades throughout E-Day development, such as improving the technology behind gore and dismemberment, because “we had this feeling fans were getting a bit desensitised to the violence in Gears”.

It’s a potentially important development for Xbox, but it comes at a time when Xbox is no small amount of disarray as wide-ranging – and ongoing – restructuring rocks Microsoft’s gaming division. Staff at The Coalition fear they could be laid off next, following the release of Gears of War: E-Day.