The Coalition engineered a selective paging system for Gears of War: E-Day on Xbox Series S that treats portions of the console’s fast NVMe SSD as a secondary memory tier, freeing roughly one additional gigabyte of usable GDDR6 RAM from the console’s constrained 10 GB pool. The bespoke solution, developed in partnership with Xbox platform teams and the Advanced Technology Group, employs access-pattern heuristics to move only idle or low-frequency data to storage while keeping active assets in system memory, allowing the title to maintain dense city environments and a 60 FPS target with the single notable concession of disabling Lumen reflections. Other Xbox studios have already expressed interest in adopting the technique as the current generation stretches amid ongoing memory supply constraints. This approach sidesteps broader hardware limitations without indiscriminate swapping penalties, though repeated paging still carries measurable overhead if over-applied. The result demonstrates a pragmatic engineering workaround rather than a systemic upgrade to the Series S platform.
A couple of gigabytes of SSD storage yields about a gigabyte of usable system memory.
- article Eurogamer - Gears of War: E-Day studio finds a way to get more performance from Xbox Series S
https://www.eurogamer.net/xbox-series-s-more-power-gears-of-war-e-day-ssd - article Digital Foundry - How Gears of War: E-Day Solves the Series S Memory Issue by Tapping the SSD
https://www.digitalfoundry.net/features/how-gears-of-war-e-day-solves-the-series-s-memory-issue-by-tapping-the-ssd - article VGC - The Coalition used the SSD on Xbox Series S as makeshift RAM
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/the-coalition-used-the-ssd-on-xbox-series-s-as-makeshift-ram-to-help-gears-of-war-e-day-run-smoothly-on-it/ - article IGN - Gears of War: E-Day Runs Smoothly on Xbox Series S By Using SSD as RAM
https://www.ign.com/articles/gears-of-war-e-day-runs-smoothly-on-xbox-series-s-by-using-ssd-as-ram
COMMENTS
so now my series s needs an SSD degree just to run gears im too old for this garbage
That SSD paging trick is actually clever as hell but yeah sorry Dad the tech jumped the shark again.
next they'll sell ram upgrades for the console they already sold you because hardware is a subscription now
If the NVMe configuration achieves a 12 percent performance uplift at scale, The Coalition's engineering costs are projected to amortize within 18 months against Series S attachment rate growth.
Colin I swear you just drained the soul out of a perfectly good hardware rant.
Bro used quarterly projections on a gear joke and expects to survive the thread. Bold strategy Cotton.