Developers get access to ‘hundreds of MBs of extra 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’s about ‘hundreds of megabytes’ on the system with 10GB of 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 get those extra few hundred MB.

The Xbox Series S is capable of producing 1440p resolution output at up to 120fps. Many games don’t make it in practice, however, and the performance gap between the Series S and Series X is often significant. The Verge got also a video from Digital Foundry above water in which the DF editors describe the relatively small memory of the Series S as the biggest performance barrier for the console, larger than the gpu and cpu. The CPU of the two variants is also the same.

In addition to more available working memory, there is even more performance improvement. The virtual graphics address allocation turned out to be much slower than address allocation for non-graphics applications. This should be fixed as of the new gdk, on both variants of the console. When these improvements actually translate into higher framerates on the consoles in question is yet to be seen.