Microsoft’s Xbox Series S, which arrived in stores about a year and a half ago, is a relatively cheap and compact alternative to the Series X console, but the financial savings are of course also expressed in weaker specifications. The main concession that game developers have complained about since launch concerns the amount of memory, which stands at 10 gigabit compared to 16 gigabit in the more expensive model. This volume is also not fully available for games, since Microsoft’s operating system has until today required about 2 gigabytes for itself at any time.
Now Microsoft hopes to improve the situation with an update to its development tools, which is already making its way to game developers creating content for the Series S. According to Microsoft, in this version of the development tools, developers will have more flexibility in terms of memory management, a change that should free up several hundred megabytes -bit at least from the working memory of the console.
“We give developers more control over memory, which can improve the console’s graphics performance in situations where the amount of memory is limited,” according to Microsoft. Of course, this is not an update that will improve the performance of games automatically: the developers will demand to take advantage of it intentionally, either through updating existing games or when creating new games.
Although the Series S is theoretically capable of displaying games with a resolution of up to 1440p and a frame rate of up to 120 frames per second, many games released for the console did not even come close to these figures. The hope is that now, the Series S will finally be able to fulfill the goals set by Microsoft at launch, and present a graphic quality closer to that of the larger and more expensive Series X.