The trick that got Gears of War: E-Day running on Xbox Series S is a clever piece of engineering and a quiet admission at the same time. The smaller Xbox does not have enough memory for the city The Coalition built, so the studio taught the game to borrow some from the console’s own storage drive.

The headlines turned that into a simple promise: the game runs smoothly on Series S. The memory trick is real. Smoothness is a separate question, and Digital Foundry’s own performance testing answers it less generously than the interview headlines suggest.

How a storage drive ends up doing a memory job

The detail comes from Kate Rayner, technical director at The Coalition, speaking to Digital Foundry. Series S ships with 10GB of GDDR6, against 16GB on Series X and PlayStation 5, and that 10GB is split: 8GB runs at 224GB/s and a slower 2GB pool at 56GB/s, as tbreak’s breakdown of the interview lays out. For a world built from around 1.6 million actors, that ceiling set the terms for every Series S decision.

The fix treats the NVMe drive as an extra tier of memory. The game tracks how its data is used. Anything that has sat untouched for a frame, or for a run of frames, becomes a candidate to move out to the SSD, and it returns to RAM when the game asks for it again. A couple of gigabytes of drive space buy back about a gigabyte of usable system memory. The system was built with Xbox’s platform team and its Advanced Technology Group, which is why it can travel beyond one studio.

Rayner’s explanation also carries a caveat that much of the coverage skipped. The operating system needs time to reclaim memory once it is freed, and during that window a game can be technically out of memory. The technique has to be tuned with care. Pushing more data onto the drive does not simply produce more RAM.

What the extra gigabyte does not buy

Memory is one limit on Series S, not the only one. The borrowed gigabyte lets the streaming system hold the dense city; it adds no GPU power and no CPU time. Digital Foundry’s technical review of the Xbox versions shows where that bill lands. The Series S performance mode targets 60 frames per second from a native resolution of around 576p, upscaled with Unreal’s TSR, and the outlet reports frequent frame-rate drops and stutters in that mode, with some frame-time spikes above 100 milliseconds.

The visual cuts also run deeper than the single trade-off in the interview. Lumen reflections are the feature Rayner named. In performance mode, Series S also loses muzzle-flash lighting and runs with reduced MegaLights quality, global illumination and foliage density. Series X runs its own 60fps mode from around 936p and holds steady in linear levels, with occasional dips in the larger open areas.

A console with 10GB of memory pushing a 1.6-million-actor Unreal Engine 5 city at a 60fps target is the achievement Rayner describes, and it stands. Smoothness is a claim about frame pacing, though, and the frame-pacing data says the Series S version plays best on a 120Hz display with variable refresh rate, which Digital Foundry says makes the drops less noticeable. Players on a standard television can also drop to the 40fps mode, which runs from around 648p.

Why other Series S games will inherit this

The longer consequence sits outside Gears. Other teams are already interested in learning how to replicate the system, though no wider adoption has been announced. If the memory tier spreads, Series S owners get versions of big games that keep more of their world intact. It will not close the gap in resolution or frame rate, because that gap was never only about memory.

Gears of War: E-Day, developed by The Coalition with People Can Fly on Unreal Engine 5 and set 14 years before the original game, launches October 6, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, with Game Pass access from day one. Premium Edition owners have been playing since October 1. Reviews have been broadly favorable, with an 87 on Metacritic for the Xbox Series X|S version.

Every Series S port that runs out of memory from here on has a known fix, built inside Xbox. The ones that still stall will be telling players the problem was something else.

Tags: Gears of War, Gears of War: E-Day, The Coalition, Digital Foundry, Xbox Series S