Last week, we mentioned how Gears of War: E-Day had been receiving quite a lot of praise for its Xbox Series S version, and how The Coalition had implemented a technique to help realise the game's potential on that console.

Today, we thought we'd dig into it a little more. In a nutshell, The Coalition found a way to use the Xbox Series S's SSD storage as an extra form of memory, working in tandem with Xbox to make it happen.

"In short, the game uses the SSD as a new tier of memory to supplement the 10GB of GDDR6 on Series S, with a bespoke system developed in collaboration with Xbox's platform team and Advanced Technology Group."

That quote above is coming from the folks at Digital Foundry, who believe that the technique "could be used as a blueprint for future games on Xbox Series S and other memory-constrained platforms".

The Coalition told the outlet that E-Day's density wouldn't have been possible without this technique, and by using it, they only had to cut out one major feature (Lumen reflections) to still retain a 60FPS gameplay target.

The explanation about how it works is a little techy, but here it is in a nutshell:

"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."

What's particularly interesting is that "other game teams are already interested" in using this technique in the future, which Digital Foundry again mentions could serve as "a fascinating blueprint for future game development on Series S".

There are downsides — overusing the technique can result in reduced performance, so The Coalition worked hard to try and tweak for a solid 60FPS — but it ultimately sounds like the positives massively outweigh the benefits.

Let's see what happens, eh? This is an interesting development that could have a particularly big impact on Xbox first-party titles going forward on the Series S, and maybe it could even extend to third-party developers in the future too.

"The wider point is that the current consoles' fast storage can do more than stream assets quickly - it can take pressure off RAM itself. For a console that's often seen as holding back cross-generation games, that could matter a lot."

What are your thoughts about this? Let us know down in the comments section below.