The Coalition gives Gears of War: E-Day about 1GB more usable memory on Xbox Series S
The Coalition used the Series S’s NVMe SSD as a slower second tier of memory to help Gears of War: E-Day handle its detailed environments. Digital Foundry says the technique yielded about 1GB of usable system memory, potentially helping the game avoid larger visual compromises on Microsoft’s less powerful console.
Bottom line — The Coalition’s SSD-paging technique gives Series S developers another tool, but it takes specialised engineering and has performance limits.
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Digital Foundry reported that the system uses access-pattern analysis to move less-used data to the SSD while keeping frequently accessed data in RAM.
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The Coalition’s studio technical director, Kate Raynor, told Digital Foundry that the approach lets the game’s streaming system hold complex city data.
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Gaming ProMax reports that E-Day uses several gigabytes of SSD space for the technique and also drops Lumen reflections on Series S.
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Raynor acknowledged to Digital Foundry that performance can degrade if data is moved back into memory too often.
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Eurogamer notes that the underlying idea of swapping data between faster and slower memory is not new, but the game-specific implementation is selective.