Gears of War: E-Day Runs Smoothly on Xbox Series S By Using SSD as RAM

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. However, 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 described how they utilized the SSD when the Series S ran out of memory. This is important for a demanding game like 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 not new; every computer does it when memory runs low by relying on a Page File. Typically, though, this slows down performance because SSDs are much slower than dedicated RAM. The key for Gears of War: E-Day was strategically choosing which data to offload to the SSD and which data to keep in faster system memory. According to Digital Foundry, The Coalition achieved this by prioritizing data that wasn't used "in a frame or over a run of frames," while keeping constantly needed data in RAM.

This approach does have limits and can degrade performance if the page file is refreshed too often. Nevertheless, with this memory trick combined with dropping Lumen reflections, The Coalition managed to get Gears of War: E-Day running quite well on the Xbox Series S. This development suggests that more developers may adopt similar approaches, as cheaper hardware becomes increasingly necessary in the current RAM crisis.