// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
We tested the RAM-saving storage tech in Gears of War: E-Day
Fast SSD leads to lower RAM requirements and smoother gameplay.
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Gears of War: E-Day delivers an impressive visual and technical showcase. The game brings together several advanced graphics technologies, including Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite and Lumen, MegaLights, and RTX Mega Geometry for more accurate ray-traced shadows and reflections, alongside a range of upscaling and frame generation technologies.
However, today we’re focusing on a less-discussed technology that plays an equally important role in bringing this visually rich, densely detailed world to systems with more limited hardware resources: storage technology designed to reduce RAM usage.
We’ll begin by examining its behavior on a high-end system with plenty of resources to spare, before moving to a more modest configuration that better represents the hardware available to the average PC gamer. This will allow us to see how much of a difference the technology makes, particularly on lower-end systems.
In an interview with Digital Foundry, The Coalition explained how they leveraged the Xbox Series S’s fast SSD to bring the dense world of Gears of War: E-Day to a memory-limited system. By effectively using the NVMe SSD as an extension of system memory, they can dynamically load and offload complex city data in real time. This approach allows the game to stream the necessary assets for each scene just in time, overcoming the console’s limited RAM.
Digital Foundry notes that the true “special sauce” lies in The Coalition’s smart data management. The team employs advanced heuristics to determine which assets are fetched from the SSD and when, carefully balancing performance. Overusing this technique could harm frame rates, so the system is tuned to swap data only when it benefits the experience.
Gears of War: E-Day also supports DirectStorage, although based on our previous testing, this alone does not always result in high SSD activity or read rates.
YouTuber Mostly Positive Reviews shared his findings in a recent post on X, where he found higher-than-usual SSD activity in Task Manager when playing the game.
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