Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl has revealed that Xbox Series S’s limited memory caused significant crashes during development. Speaking in a recent interview with Kotaku, Buhl explained that many game levels were crashing on the budget console just six–12 months ago.
“I will say that the biggest thing we did that was a challenge for us was dealing with the console’s limited memory,” Buhl said. The crashes forced DICE to completely rethink their approach to memory management.
The Xbox Series S has just 10GB of total memory, with about 8GB available for games. This is significantly less than the 16GB found in PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, which offer developers 12–13GB of usable memory. For a game as ambitious as Battlefield, with its massive maps, destructible environments, and 128-player battles, every megabyte counts.
Rather than scale back their vision, DICE dove deep into optimization. The team spent months aggressively trimming memory usage across code, assets, and streaming systems. They refined texture compression, improved asset streaming, and tightened memory management throughout the Frostbite engine.
The results exceeded expectations. According to Buhl, this optimization process “made the whole game better and more stable” across all platforms. What started as a Series S problem became a solution that benefited PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC players alike.
When life gives you memory limits, make optimization lemonade
This isn’t the first time developers have struggled with Series S constraints. Its lower memory has been a recurring challenge for studios pushing technical boundaries. But Battlefield 6‘s story shows how hardware limitations can sometimes drive innovation. The stability improvements gained from Series S optimization will help players with mid-range PCs and GPUs with 8GB of VRAM experience smoother gameplay.
While DICE hasn’t revealed specific performance targets for each platform, they confirm the Series S version now runs reliably without the crashes that plagued earlier builds. The team achieved this without cutting content, maintaining Microsoft’s requirement for gameplay parity between Xbox consoles.
