Xbox Series S is 'quite solid' despite limited memory, FF7 director Naoki Hamaguchi says

Microsoft's Xbox Series S is a capable machine when it comes to processing, but more developers are saying the memory is a problem.

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The Xbox Series S has been controversial right at launch; what appeared to be a low-cost entry point to Xbox was discovered to be a significantly weaker console that's a lot less powerful and a lot slower than the Xbox Series X. Cross-platform parity meant devs had to scale their games to work on both systems despite the discrepancy.

Interestingly enough, it's not really the processing power that developers are having the most trouble with. The Series S only has 10GB of unified GDDR6 RAM, meaning both the GPU and system pull from the same memory--there's no dedicated video RAM separated out. That's nearly 40% less than the Series X's 16GB of RAM. It's not just the capacity, though, but the speed of the memory itself. The Series S' system memory is much slower than the Series X, with the Series S RAM reaching 224GB/sec max speeds compared to the Series X's maximum of 560GB/sec.

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We've seen multiple developers talk about the Series S' limited memory in the past, including Battlefield 6 developer DICE, Control and Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment, and more recently Dune: Awakening developer Funcom. It was also believed that Larian delayed Baldur's Gate 3's release on Xbox because of the Series S' memory.

Now another developer adds his voice to the chorus.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth game director Naoki Hamaguchi tells Windows Centralthat the Series S is an overall solid system, but also touched upon the memory challenges:

"In terms of hardware specs, I would say the Xbox Series S is actually quite solid in terms of spec. We didn't come across much of a processing challenge, but many of the challenges were more memory related.

"Optimization is something we were strongly cognizant of as we worked on the PC version as well. For Final Fantasy 7 Remake, we took some of the philosophies found in Nanite for Unreal Engine 5 and created our own solution for Unreal Engine 4. We were successful in delivering stable graphics there, and gain Steam Deck verification as well. We have been pretty proud of what we were able to achieve, even on lower spec systems."

These comments are important because they shape the current and future landscape of game development--the harder it is for developers to make games on a system, the longer it'll take, but for most publishers it's worth it to bring games to Xbox platforms.