The makers of Gears of War: E-Day have found a method to squeeze more power from the Xbox Series S hardware. This approach treats the console’s SSD as if it were additional memory, and it is smart enough that other game developers may wish to borrow it for their own work.
The game’s dense environments need a lot of system memory, and the Series S only has 10GB of GDDR6 RAM. That is a tight fit for any game, and for a title with this much detail, it borders on impossible. The Coalition’s solution was to offload some of that data onto the console’s ultra-fast NVMe SSD storage drive.
The NVMe Hack
NVMe SSD drives carry their own set of RAM modules, which lets them serve as extra memory when required. The trouble is pace: NVMe drives do not move at quite the same speed as genuine RAM. To get around this, The Coalition treated the NVMe as a secondary level of memory, a sort of swap space where the game sends over assets and then moves what is needed into the quicker GDDR6 once it is asked for.
The machine selects portions of data that are unlikely to suffer from being placed on slower memory, using “advanced heuristics”, which looks at how often those chunks are accessed. “Frequently used data stays in RAM, and anything idle can move to the SSD,” Digital Foundry’s report added.
What the System Actually Does
Digital Foundry’s report says you can trade a few gigabytes of SSD storage for roughly a gigabyte of extra system memory. The deal works because the game keeps changing which resource gets used at any given moment, so the loss of storage space is exchanged for a gain in usable RAM.
Throughout the development of E-Day, the Coalition made additional investments in engine upgrades beyond the core features, including enhancements to the technology powering gore and dismemberment, for the reason that “we had this feeling fans were getting a bit desensitised to the violence in Gears.”
The Big Question
The natural follow-up question concerns whether future Xbox titles might employ comparable methods to boost performance on Xbox Series S, given that large-world games such as GTA 6 and Fable are coming soon. While the specific approach used in Gears of War: E-Day appears to be its own, the concept of moving data between slower and faster memory is not without precedent. Mac devices, for example, have long distinguished themselves through their particular facility with this kind of operation.
What This Means for Xbox
This could prove to be a significant step forward for Xbox, yet it arrives amid serious upheaval within the company. A sweeping restructuring is still under way at Microsoft’s gaming division, and staff at The Coalition fear they could be let go next, coming right after the launch of Gears of War: E-Day.
A hardware fix has been found, yet it changes nothing about the company’s uncertain fate. The hack answers one issue, while the larger question of whether The Coalition endures remains unanswered.
The Future of Xbox Performance
With the present console era growing older, creative workarounds will be required to meet the requirements of triple-A titles. This generation could endure for a longer period than originally planned due to persisting memory shortages, and The Coalition’s hack demonstrates one potential approach to addressing those constraints.
Key Facts
- Game: Gears of War: E-Day
- Console: Xbox Series S (10GB GDDR6 RAM)
- SSD: NVMe storage drive
- Memory gain: About 1GB of usable system memory from a couple of gigabytes of SSD storage
- Developer: The Coalition
- Tech partner: Xbox’s Advanced Technology Group
This solution is a clever workaround, and it is the kind of thinking that keeps older hardware useful. It depends on whether other studios face the same issues and share the same approach toward treating storage as a temporary fix. The game performs better than expected for now, and that is the measure of the trick.
Source material: “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,” Eurogamer.
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