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

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Xbox Series S Is A "Pain" For Developers Due To Memory Issues: Report

The Xbox Series S, the younger sibling in the new Xbox family, which offers a considerably cheaper alternative, is apparently a great choice.
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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.
 
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.
 
 
THEAP99 said:
Not surprised. Xbox will learn this lesson the hard way in the coming years
Click to expand...

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.
 
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?
 
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.
 
Series S will be just fine. And even more so once all those resolution techniques kick in within a year or two.
 
SlimySnake said:
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.
Click to expand...

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?
 
Less ignore all the pc, which has lower power than the xss.

We will be having this discussion for a long time. So brace yourself for more xss hate.

If starfield runs well on xss, then that defeats the entire hatred argument against XSS.
 
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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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Even if devs got rid of the highest mip of the textures, I imagine they still would struggle to have it fit ram of series s, while making the game look like crap.
 
This feels like a "No Shit Sherlock" moment we all knew this would be an issue as soon as the specs were revealed. It's not a big deal though, the people who buy the XSS aren't concerned with having a good experience and they deserve whatever developers can manage.
 
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Quantum253 said:
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?
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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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elliot5 said:
The series s is magnitude stronger than the switch that's a ridiculous claim
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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.
 
We all know that the games that are developed for XBSX will play on PCs way weaker than current-gen consoles so they are just complaining about optimizing for more than 2 consoles?
 
Riky said:
Y8Zg8fd.jpg


Luckily it contains the hardware for this very problem.
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Textures are easiest to scale in terms of ram and they dont touch collision detection kind of assets or gameplay assets. If anything SFS makes things harder to scale since less ram is allocated to textures.
 
I don't want to imagine how gimped the game has to be in the next 4 years in order to accommodate the Series S specs. Not in the graphical sense but in the game design sense. It's kinda disappointing but it is what it is.
 
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.
 
Didn't recall hearing this when they where developing for the PS2 a console that had half the memory of the original Xbox, ot those gen7 ports to switch, this is more a complain of having to optimize for 2 consoles.
 
GHG said:
Are you a developer? Where's your game?
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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.
 
Riky said:
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.
Click to expand...
They also said every Xbox was gonna ship with a Kinect hopefully they drop the S as fast they did the Kinect
 
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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I feel like all we hear is that it's too weak etc. etc. but I've yet to see any games not being able to run on it, and we're almost two years into the generation at this point.
 
They'll find a way like most of the time . But it probably take more time to optimize on series S .

You guys remember how Skyrim's dawnguard dlc on PS3 got delay because it dont have enough ram ?
 
Developers are always complaining about memory. If they could choose, consoles would have at least 64 gigs of RAM so they don't need to optimize. PC players should be well aware of this.
 
Riky said:
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.
Click to expand...

That's a lot of words to say no.
 
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