The Coalition has employed an innovative engineering solution to ensure that Gears of War: E-Day performs well on the Xbox Series S, despite the console's hardware limitations. This technical feat allows the game to largely maintain its visual fidelity on the weaker hardware by leveraging the console's NVMe SSD.
A deep dive by Digital Foundry revealed that The Coalition's approach involves using the SSD as an extension of the console's Random Access Memory (RAM). Typically, when a game's data exceeds the available RAM, developers resort to significant graphical downgrades for the Series S, which has 10GB of RAM compared to the Series X's 16GB. However, The Coalition opted to use the NVMe drive to store memory that isn't actively being accessed, moving it into system RAM as needed. This process is similar to paged virtual memory, but it specifically targets subsets of data that can be retrieved from the drive without causing noticeable slowdowns.
This technique effectively grants the streaming system more room to load and hold complex game data, such as intricate city environments. In exchange for a few gigabytes of SSD storage, the game gains approximately one gigabyte of usable system memory. The studio utilized advanced heuristics to meticulously manage which assets were stored on the SSD and which remained in RAM, thereby minimizing potential performance impacts.
As a result of this optimization, the only significant feature cut from the Xbox Series S version of Gears of War: E-Day was Lumen reflections. According to studio technical director Kate Rayner, this decision allowed The Coalition to deliver a version of the game that avoids the substantial visual compromises often seen on less powerful hardware. While the game largely succeeds in presenting a visually rich experience, performance can fluctuate. Reports indicate that certain action sequences and chapter transitions may experience framerate dips on the Series S, a trade-off considered acceptable given the console's specifications and price point.