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Gears of War: E-Day Uses SSD on Xbox Series S as Makeshift RAM to Help Game Run Better – News
The Coalition technical director Kate speaking with Digital Foundry revealed the studio used the SSD storage in the Xbox Series S as Makeshift RAM to get Gears of War: E-Day running more smoothly than it would have otherwise.
The Xbox Series S comes with 10GB of RAM, while the more powerful Xbox Series X and <a href="https://comicvibe.com/playstation-plus-essential-october-free-games-rolling-out-now/” title=”PlayStation Plus Essential October Free Games Rolling Out Now”>PlayStation 5 have 16 GB of RAM.
The article reveals there is a “hierarchy of data storage that successively trades off speed for capacity: caches on a CPU are super-fast but hold only a tiny amount of data, RAM serves a middle ground and SSDs have a huge amount of storage but access times many many times slower. If the data you’re working on can’t be kept in the CPU, it goes to the RAM; if it’s expelled from RAM, you have to read it out of storage, taking a speed penalty at every stage.
“The Coalition’s system lets the game use the NVMe drive as random access memory, giving the streaming system enough to room to load and hold the complex city data. Memory that isn’t being actively accessed is stored on disk, and what’s needed at that moment is moved into system RAM. It’s similar to paged virtual memory, with one important difference: it only covers specific subsets of memory that the team has decided won’t slow the game down if they have to come back from the drive. The benefit is that, in exchange for a couple of gigabytes of storage on the SSD, you can gain about a gigabyte of usable system memory.
“Deciding what gets paged out is where most of the special sauce lies. The Coalition use advanced heuristics to make that call, with the system tracking access patterns and seeing which data was used most recently. Memory that isn’t used in a frame, or over a run of frames, becomes a candidate for paging. Frequently used data stays in RAM, and anything idle can move to the SSD. It only works because the NVMe drive is fast enough to bring paged data back without the player noticing – a nice workaround that ameliorates one of the biggest issues with the Series S.
“The developers say that the game’s density wouldn’t have been possible with the use of the technique. The world contains around 1.6 million actors, so fitting everything into Series S memory became the baseline for all of the game’s scaling work. The Series S is far from a slow platform – its CPU runs rings around last-gen machines like the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro – it’s just about making the most of its 10GB of shared GDDR6 memory, versus the 16GB of the Xbox Series X. With this system in place, only one major feature had to be cut – Lumen reflections – in order to get a reasonable 60fps lock.”
Gears of War: E-Day will launch for the Xbox Series X|S, PC
A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
