Larian is having trouble fitting Baldur’s Gate III on the Xbox Series S, the lower-priced and lower-powered console in Microsoft’s ninth-generation lineup.
I was looking up more information on why there’s such an issue getting BG3 on Xbox, and found this article with a lot more detail on the topic.
EDIT: The issue isn’t graphics or frame rate; it’s memory. The article goes into detail.
Microsoft is OK with the S having a lower resolution and frame rate, that’s why it exists.
They aren’t OK with the X having a feature that the S does not, and that’s what’s blocking Baldur’s Gate 3. Split screen is possible on the X, it’s not (currently) possible on the S, that’s what they’re working on.
Removing split screen from both isn’t an option because the PS5 version supports it. The Xbox version would get murdered if they do it.
The reason why split screen doesn’t work on the S is, yes, due to the available memory. At it’s best, it has 8GB that runs 1/2 the speed of the X, + another 2GB that are so slow as to be essentially useless for gaming.
BG3’s PC minimum specs list 4gb vram and 8gb normal ram. Assuming windows uses 3 gb, that’s 9gbs of total memory that the game needs. They could just use lower res textures when in splitscreen and be done with it, but I guess they want to compromise as little as possible
Edit: apparently Microsoft wants games to use less than 6 just in case someone tries to activate all background functions at once. That is indeed quite stupid.
That’s still more RAM than the S has available once you take system overhead into account.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/xbox-series-s-suffers-from-vram-limitations-just-like-8gb-gpus
I didn’t see any mentions of how much overhead the system has in the article? I had assumed it would be 2 gb as why else would they make 2gb of the memory slower than the rest. Someone else in the thread basically confirms that, but apparently Microsoft wants games to run within 6gbs just in case background downloads / chat etc takes 2gb more.
Yeah, I don’t see how that 2GB at 32gb/s is useful for much of anything. :( It’s a severe handicap.
What could split screen bring that it will not work with the S memory? Because one object will not take up twice the space just because split screen. The texture of it will (hopefully) only loaded once for both screens.
What can change is the total amount of objects that are loaded into memory since the players can now be simultaneously on two different places.
So as a Developer you will need to find a way to get around this. Maybe by reducing the textures of the objects even more, so that you can load more of them in the same space. Or maybe by remove non essential object from the scene at all so that by default less object needed to be loaded. Also the screen is now half the size so maybe limit the field of view more to start loading in objects a little later.
What ever they decide to do, this will require additional steps that are only needed because MS want’s the game to be optimised for the series S.
From a Developer perspective I could understand if they maybe decide to ditch the Xbox release completely because of this additional workload needed.
Plus: if removing background objects from the scene in order to save memory is something that needs to be consistent on both S and X version because of MS policy, you will get “less graphics” on the X then what would be possible, just because the S exist… What completely undermines the complete existence of the X.
And of course non of this is just because split screen. This will most likely be true for every game on Xbox. It’s just that for most games it’s enough to cut resolution down for the S and leave the rest as it is.
That’s not the way split screen works.
Each view of the world requires that the entire visible world be loaded twice, so that it can be seen from each players perspective independent of the other.
If we go into a dungeon, I go left and you go right, it has to render both pathways simultaneously. In a single player or single screen two player game, it only has one path to consider.
Loading in memory and rendering are different things. Of course it needs to be rendered twice but also you cut resolution in half so rendered both screens is not that much more of work.
Tell me you don’t know anything about game development without telling me you don’t know anything about game development.
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Dunning-Kruger strikes again.
Did I at some point say that I’m the most advanced expert?
I just pointed out that many of the statements in the article don’t make sense from a logical point of view. Split screen with this game on the S will be possible, I’m sure it will, but that requires additional work to do regardless of what the reasoning behind this is.
Now I just reading pointless sh*t Talk while I was trying to hold a technical conversation… But yes thank you all.
Dude, you rocked up saying both the writer and I didn’t “seam [sic] to know much about video game development,” then proceeded to be, well, loud and wrong about how split screen works. You can’t get defensive when you started out attacking.