Some time ago, a rumor emerged that developers were having difficulty producing games for the Xbox Series S, as the console has technical specifications far below those of the PS5 and Xbox Series X.
This week, reports surfaced that Microsoft’s home console is experiencing serious memory allocation issues in Borderlands 3, at least according to Reddit user u/jokekiller94 – who posted a screenshot of the game crashing on his console. with an “out of memory” error on the screen.
It appears that several users are reporting memory bottleneck issues on the Xbox Series S. Reddit user u/bacon_sammer responded in one of the threads citing the issue on the platform, saying that he has the same problem with Borderlands 3 crashing frequently on his Xbox Series S. He said the game runs fine on Xbox Series X, however it seems to be a Series S issue.
Unfortunately, this type of memory allocation issue is not uncommon on Microsoft’s small console. According to reports from Digital Foundry and The Verge, the console’s small memory capacity is a headache for developers to optimize. It’s the biggest contributing factor to the console’s lower graphics settings and lack of ray tracing effects, which throttle the console’s already weak 4 Teraflops GPU (PS4 Pro level).
Apparently, complaints among developers regarding the Series S’s memory had become so extreme that Microsoft released a development kit in June 2022 that gave developers more manipulation control over the console’s memory system.
The console has a 4TF AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 20 compute units clocked at 1550 MHz, a 512 GB NVMe SSD and 10 GB of GDDR6 memory that is shared between the CPU and the GPU. Oddly, the memory bandwidth is mixed, with 8GB showing 224GB/s of bandwidth and the other 2GB running at a mere 56GB/s.
The 10GB memory capacity is why console memory allocation errors are so troublesome. Modern PC titles generally recommend at least 16GB of system RAM, plus at least 6GB to 8GB of VRAM for gaming on high settings. The Series S’s unified memory system lowers a game’s memory requirements compared to a PC, but 10GB is still too small a number for modern gaming (not to mention the unorthodox bandwidth configuration where only 8GB run at high speed).
Thankfully, memory allocation errors don’t seem to be a widespread issue, and we’re hoping the Borderlands 3 developers will fix this issue in a future patch. In any case, the overall longevity of the Xbox Series S doesn’t look good, due to past and present memory capacity issues.
Have you ever had a similar issue with your Series S?
