Gears of War: E-Day runs at 60fps on Series S after SSD memory trick

The Coalition has turned the Xbox Series S storage drive into makeshift extra memory to keep Gears of War: E-Day running smoothly.

Technical director Kate Rayner explained the trick in an interview with Digital Foundry, as reported by Video Games Chronicle. It is a clever fix for a very practical limit.

The limit is RAM, the fast short-term workspace a console uses to hold what is on screen right now. Xbox Series S has 10 GB of RAM, compared with 16 GB on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Microsoft requires games made for Series X to also run on Series S, so the less powerful console cannot simply be skipped.

E-Day stretches that rule. The third-person shooter, action-adventure game from The Coalition, part of Xbox Game Studios, presents a huge, dense city that demands a lot of memory at once. That kind of detail fits more comfortably on Series X. On Series S, it needed help.

Rayner said the team used the Series S internal SSD, its very fast solid-state storage, to also act as RAM and hold the city data. When the game needs a certain chunk of memory, it moves that chunk from the SSD into system RAM. The team picked specific parts of memory that could be shifted on the fly without slowing the game down.

The maths is tight. A couple of gigabytes of SSD space can add around a gigabyte of usable system memory. That was enough.

The result on Series S is 60 frames per second, the measure of how smoothly motion plays, with only Lumen-based reflections removed. Rayner said the technique let the studio avoid really lowering the quality of the game to fit the smaller console.

Other game teams are already interested in copying the method for future Series S games. Digital Foundry described the SSD-based solution as a potential blueprint for other memory-constrained platforms.

What makes this stand out is the restraint. No separate cut-down version. No stuttering city. Just careful plumbing underneath, so players on the cheapest current Xbox still get the speed the series is known for.