While not the most powerful console out there, the smaller and more affordable Xbox Series S has been a huge success for Xbox. But some developers have reportedly felt the strain of getting bigger, more advanced games to run on the console, and in response, Microsoft is freeing up some memory to help improve the tiny console’s performance.
As spotted by The Verge, Microsoft hopes to make the Xbox Series S a bit more powerful by freeing up some memory and letting developers access that extra memory if needed. In a video explaining this new developer-focused update, Microsoft says it’s unlocking “hundreds of additional megabytes of memory” and that this will, in theory, give studios more control over how to use the console’s limited memory. Microsoft says this “may improve graphics performance under limited memory conditions.”
To be clear, this isn’t like Microsoft quadrupling the power of the S Series. Nor is this Microsoft flipping some secret switch to allow the console to start running games at 8K and 240Hz or anything like that. Instead, the $300 ($416) S series is adjusting the amount of memory dedicated to non-gaming features.
While the more powerful Xbox Series X console has 16GB of RAM, the cheaper Xbox Series S only has 10GB. But before this update, developers only had access to 8GB of that memory, as Microsoft reserved about 2GB for the console’s operating system. Developers will now have a few hundred extra megabytes of memory, which could help some games run a little better in the future.
The Xbox Series S has always been positioned by Microsoft as a cheaper, less powerful, but still capable next-gen console option. And it’s proven to be a very popular piece of hardware since it launched alongside the beefier Xbox Series X in 2020. Hell, I already had an Xbox Series X and ended up buying one. It’s become the main way to play in our living room, perfect for Fall Guys and Fortnite. But for more intense games it can be difficult, and requires lowering the frame rate or resolution. This has reportedly caused some problems and frustration for developers trying to run certain games on the smaller machine.
A recent example of a game with different performance on the S Series is the game Evil Dead, which was released without a 60fps performance mode on the cheaper machine. Resident Evil Village also limits gameplay to just 45fps at 1440p and 30fps if you enable ray tracing.
Hopefully, a few extra chunks of memory can help developers working on Xbox ports not feel as affected by the weaker Xbox Series S.