Developers get access to ‘hundreds of extra MB’s of ram’ on Xbox Series S

Microsoft is going to make more Xbox Series S memory available to developers. This should give developers better performance. It concerns ‘hundreds of megabytes’ on the system with 10GB ram.

The Xbox Series S has 10GB of ram and the Xbox Series X has 16GB of ram. Of this, 2GB is reserved for the operating system, leaving 8 and 14GB of ram, respectively, for the games on the systems. Now, with the June 2022 gdk, developers are getting that extra few hundred MB.

The Xbox Series S is capable of outputting 1440p resolution output at up to 120fps. However, many games fall short of that in practice and the performance gap between the Series S and the Series X is often significant. The Verge pulled out also a video from Digital Foundry above water in which the DF editors label the relatively small memory of the Series S as the biggest performance barrier for the console, greater than the gpu and cpu. The CPU of the two variants is also the same.

In addition to more available working memory, even more performance has been improved. The virtual graphics address allocation turned out to be much slower than address allocation for non-graphic applications. This should be fixed with the new gdk, on both variants of the console. When these improvements actually translate into higher frame rates on the consoles in question remains to be seen.