There are serious memory issues on the Xbox Series S. Borderlands 3, at least according to Reddit user u/jokekiller94 — who posted a screenshot of the game crashing on their Series S console with an “out of memory” error on the screen.
The issue isn’t limited to the original poster — Reddit user u/bacon_sammer responded in the thread, saying they have the same issue with Borderlands 3 crashing frequently on their Xbox Series S. They said the game runs fine on the Xbox Series X, however, so the it seems to be a Series S issue.
This type of memory issue is unfortunately not unique to Microsoft’s tiny console. Digital Foundry’s and The Verge’s reports claim that the Series S has a small memory capacity, which is difficult for developers to optimize. This is the biggest factor in the lower graphics settings on Series S port and the lack of ray tracing effects. It also bottlenecks the console’s 4 Teraflop GPU (PS4 Pro-level).
Microsoft released in June 2022 a developer kit that allowed developers to manipulate the Series S memory system.
Microsoft’s Xbox Series S console is the latest entry-level console to run on AMD’s RDNA 2 and Zen 2 architectures. The console is equipped with a 4TF RDNA 2 AMD GPU that has 20 compute units clocked 1550MHz. A 512GB NVMe drive and 10GB GDDR6 RAM are shared by the CPU and GPU. The memory bandwidth is oddly mixed. 8GB of the RAM has 224GB/s bandwidth, while the remaining 2GB only have 56GB/s bandwidth.
It is because of the 10GB memory that memory allocation issues with Series S are so difficult. Most PC games today recommend at least 8GB VRAM and 16GB system RAM. Series S’ unified system of memory reduces a game’s memory requirement compared to PC. However, 10GB is still not enough for modern gaming.
Memory allocation errors do not appear to be a common problem. Borderlands 3 Developers will fix this issue in a later patch. However, the Xbox Series S has a poor longevity due to its memory capacity problems.
