The Gears of War: E-Day development team uses the Xbox Series S's built-in SSD to temporarily store some city data, adding approximately 1GB of usable memory for the game; meanwhile, Lumen-based reflection effects were removed to maintain 60 frames per second. Kate Rayner, Technical Director at The Coalition, introduced this optimization approach in an interview with Digital Foundry.
The Xbox Series S has 10GB of RAM, while the Xbox Series X and PS5 have 16GB. For Gears of War: E-Day, which needs to process large amounts of scene data, the smaller memory capacity limits how much content can remain in system memory simultaneously.
The team temporarily stores detailed city data on the console's built-in SSD, loading it into system memory only when needed. Rayner stated that the team carefully selected data suitable for this streaming method to avoid noticeable slowdowns during loading. This approach requires several gigabytes of SSD space.
Rayner believes these adjustments allowed the team to avoid significantly reducing the game's visual quality. Other development teams have expressed interest in learning about this data streaming technique.