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Digital Foundry: Heard that Xbox Series S Is A "Pain" For Developers Due To Memory Issues

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IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman



On their new podcast, Digital Foundry has revealed some interesting details about the Xbox Series S. According to them, the developers are having a difficult time making games for the consoles. It is highlighted that multiple developers have stated that the Xbox Series S is a pain at times.

One might be wondering that the weaker hardware is the culprit for the problems faced by the developers, but there is actually more to it. Notably, the CPU and GPU power isn’t what has been making it difficult for developers. Instead, it is the memory constraints that are posing problems for the developers.
 

NeonGhost

uses 'M$' - What year is it? Not 2002.
 
Not surprised. Xbox will learn this lesson the hard way in the coming years

What lesson will that be? It continuing to outsell Xbox 360?

There will be no lesson learned because the system is serving its purpose. Also, Sampler Feedback Streaming exists and will immediately remedy that memory issue when utilized. And lower resolution and lower quality textures is a known solution for Series S's memory problems. The CPU is more than up to the task and there's much more still to draw out of the system.
 

Quantum253

Member
I thought the Series S was supposed to be scaled down, for those who were cost conscience, but still allowed an enjoyable experience? I would imagine having slower and smaller allocated memory would require additional work to make games work. So is it this type of work that's making it a pain or something completely different?
 

Hoddi

Member
Dunno, I think it's too early to panic. The whole promise of having SSDs was to make memory capacity a lesser issue since going from 8GB to 16GB was already a very small increase to start with.

Anyway, I'm sure this thread will go over well with tons of new info and non-rehashed arguments.
 
I mean we heard this before launch. After launch. We saw the specs. We are not stupid.

As long as this doesn’t impact series x, i couldn’t care less. If you are buying a cheap 4 tflops console, you shouldn’t be expecting next Gen performance.

UE5 Matrix demo is thoroughly next gen and works on it. Looks next gen to me.

Or is next gen beholden to resolution you play on?
 

Kumomeme

Member
pc has specific minimum requirement for each game that released on it which is not same for every game. it can be higher or lower, cpu/gpu bound etc. and it is up to player to upgrade their specs if needed especially if their build is old.

while console specs is fixed and until end of generation.
 
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Hobbygaming

has been asked to post in 'Grounded' mode.
I thought the Series S was supposed to be scaled down, for those who were cost conscience, but still allowed an enjoyable experience? I would imagine having slower and smaller allocated memory would require additional work to make games work. So is it this type of work that's making it a pain or something completely different?
I'm betting it's the small 8GBs of ram for games at the low bandwidth of 224GB/s, there's 2 more gigabytes of memory but they're mainly for the OS and are only 56GB/s

The Xbox Series S will lower our baseline for multiplatform games this generation unfortunately
 
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The series s is magnitude stronger than the switch that’s a ridiculous claim
I'm not directly trying to put down the Series S. I'm saying it exists as a bridge between the PS4/X1X/Switch and the PS5/XSX gens. It will have to be developed for whether devs hate it or not because it has a big enough audience now.
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
I can see it being true to an extent. I'd love to know what devs and which games. I wonder if the memory is what's causing an even more reduced resolution in some games.

There's no way the memory can be as bad as the ps3 situation and devs worked with that.
 

Riky

$MSFT
Are you a developer? Where's your game?

Same place as yours.

That's taken from a Microsoft presentation for developers, so it's nothing to do with me personally I'm afraid.

What Microsoft actually say when asked this very question is more relevant,

"
The biggest consumers for memory are really the render targets and the texture budget and both of those shrink significantly with targeting the lower resolution - so 1440p is 44 per cent of the size of 2160p and so right there, all your render targets get less," says Andrew Goossen. "And with g-buffers and all that, that is a lot of memory right there in terms of memory consumption. And there, the texture budgets are very significant as well, so we feel good about the 8GB that we make available."

Microsoft has also pioneered technologies like shader feedback sampling, which see texture management handled much more efficiently - which can act as a multiplier on memory consumption, not to mention in reducing streaming bandwidth."

I guess they should know having designed the hardware.
 

NeonGhost

uses 'M$' - What year is it? Not 2002.
Same place as yours.

That's taken from a Microsoft presentation for developers, so it's nothing to do with me personally I'm afraid.

What Microsoft actually say when asked this very question is more relevant,

"
The biggest consumers for memory are really the render targets and the texture budget and both of those shrink significantly with targeting the lower resolution - so 1440p is 44 per cent of the size of 2160p and so right there, all your render targets get less," says Andrew Goossen. "And with g-buffers and all that, that is a lot of memory right there in terms of memory consumption. And there, the texture budgets are very significant as well, so we feel good about the 8GB that we make available."

Microsoft has also pioneered technologies like shader feedback sampling, which see texture management handled much more efficiently - which can act as a multiplier on memory consumption, not to mention in reducing streaming bandwidth."

I guess they should know having designed the hardware.
They also said every Xbox was gonna ship with a Kinect hopefully they drop the S as fast they did the Kinect
 

skit_data

Member
I was skeptical about the Series S from the start but I don’t think the memory will be a huge issue in terms of game design in the end but; We have seen the advertised resolution drop from 1440p with ray tracing capability, to ”of course it was always gonna be a 1080p machine” down to 720-900p without ray tracing and everything is supposedly still working as advertised. I think most games will run at 720p at the most on Series S by the end of the gen in order to compensate for the lower amount of memory.
 
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GHG

Gold Member
Same place as yours.

That's taken from a Microsoft presentation for developers, so it's nothing to do with me personally I'm afraid.

What Microsoft actually say when asked this very question is more relevant,

"
The biggest consumers for memory are really the render targets and the texture budget and both of those shrink significantly with targeting the lower resolution - so 1440p is 44 per cent of the size of 2160p and so right there, all your render targets get less," says Andrew Goossen. "And with g-buffers and all that, that is a lot of memory right there in terms of memory consumption. And there, the texture budgets are very significant as well, so we feel good about the 8GB that we make available."

Microsoft has also pioneered technologies like shader feedback sampling, which see texture management handled much more efficiently - which can act as a multiplier on memory consumption, not to mention in reducing streaming bandwidth."

I guess they should know having designed the hardware.

That's a lot of words to say no.
 
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