Gears of War: E-Day Devs Use SSD Trick to Boost Xbox Series S Performance

Ever wondered how the Xbox Series S handles a beast like Gears of War: E-Day? The Coalition pulled off a clever trick: using the console's SSD as extra RAM. Studio technical director Kate Raynor explained to Digital Foundry that when the Series S ran out of memory, they tapped into the SSD to keep things running.

Here's the deal: the Xbox Series S has only 10GB of RAM, while the Series X packs 16GB. That's a big gap, especially for a demanding game like Gears of War: E-Day. So The Coalition found a workaround. They offloaded some data from RAM to the SSD, similar to how your PC uses a page file when it runs out of memory. But SSDs are way slower than RAM, so doing this carelessly can tank performance.

The magic was in being smart about what to offload. According to Digital Foundry, The Coalition prioritized data that wasn't used "in a frame or over a run of frames," keeping frequently needed data in RAM. This approach isn't perfect—if the page file gets refreshed too often, performance can degrade over time. But combined with dropping Lumen reflections, it got Gears of War: E-Day running pretty well on the Series S.

Why does this matter? The Xbox Series S is the cheaper, less powerful Xbox, and with the ongoing RAM crisis, optimizing for it is becoming more crucial. Hopefully, more developers adopt similar tricks. Gears of War: E-Day launched last week into early access and brings some big changes to the series. The Coalition is proud that it's now one of Xbox's main exclusives.

So, what do you think? Will you be picking up Gears of War: E-Day on Xbox Series S, or are you upgrading to the X? Let us know in the comments!