In a bid to make the digital only Xbox Series S more user and developer friendly, notable upgrades have been applied to the system to improve the overall experience.
In what Microsoft is calling the June 2022 Game Development Kit, today Xbox announced that the more affordable Series S is receiving an overhaul to increase its maximum potential and improve the overall experience for users of the console without a disk tray. What’s included is detailed in a YouTube video that can be seen below.
The beginning of the video describes the ‘GDK’ as “a complete set of tools, APIs (application programming interface), extensions and programming models that can be used across current and future Microsoft gaming platforms and initiatives,” which can sound a little hostile, but continues with “The Design and features of the GDK are driven by your feedback about how you like to develop games.” The aim of the new GDK is to allow any aspiring game creator to create at their leisure for Xbox and PC Game Pass.
One of the main problems plaguing the Xbox Series S since launch has been its lack of memory, as detailed by Forbes in an article written back in 2020. The article suggests “out of 512 GB on its SSD, only 364 GB appears to be free for actual game installation,” which is a paltry sum for those who play massive experiences like Marvel’s Avengers, or Call of Duty: Warzone considering both titles rake system memory with near 200 GB of installation speed required to download all the necessary components.
While the GDK video claims optimization will happen in different ways besides the ” Hundreds of additional MBs of memory,” the upgrades can “improve graphics performance in memory constrained conditions,” with a promise that the new memory will cease to negatively affect the overall console graphical performance. There is also no mention whether these enhancements will be usable with the new attachable screen the Xbox Series S recently released called the xScreen.
Fans who opt to look further into this can visit the Microsoft GDK website for more info regarding these enhancements on the Xbox Series S, with the new GDK however, it seems becoming a ID@Xbox developer is a shorter arms reach away than initially.
