Larian has delayed the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, currently on pace to possibly be 2023’s Game of the Year, until they can figure out how to make split-screen work on Series S.

  • @[email protected]
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    311 months ago

    To be clear, I’m not trying to attack Larian here. I think splitscreen is a much bigger technical hurdle than other games have to deal with and delaying it on the Xbox was the right idea. But, the PC versions minimum requirements is 4GB vram and recommended 8GB vram. The Series S has 10GB vram. I’m more annoyed by the anti Series S rhetoric going around about it holding all games back, because most games with a PC release scale no problem

    • @[email protected]
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      1311 months ago

      What you forgot to consider is that the Xbox has to share the RAM with the VRAM. The game on PC has 8GB RAM and 4GB VRAM as minimum. That is 12GB of RAM. The Series S only has 10GB. Which is 2GB less than minimum.

      • @[email protected]
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        411 months ago

        You needs less RAM in total on a system with a unified memory architecture, like both Xbox consoles.

        • Neshura
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          311 months ago

          True but not 2GB less, the Xbox is also still running an OS albeit a slimer one. I’d guess the smaller OS saves at best 1GB of RAM.

      • @[email protected]
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        111 months ago

        I did not realise that the Series S shared it’s Ram and VRAM. That is something I had missed. Thank you

        • @[email protected]
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          311 months ago

          And with PC, there is only one view point at one time. You can have characters all over the map, but it only needs to render one at a time. Worst case it loads and unloads assets as you switch back and forth. With split screen console, gotta have both loaded at the same time.

    • redfellow
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      1011 months ago

      It’s not baseless rhetoric when a dev team has literally called it out as a big tech hurdle.

    • Neshura
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      311 months ago

      What you’re not seeing or understanding:

      The Xbox Seried S does not have 10GB VRAM it has 10GB VRAM/RAM that can be dynamically allocated to whatever the game needs.

      Baldur’s Gate 3 needs 12GB combined VRAM/RAM at minimum. While the Xbox OS peobably doesn’t eat as much RAM as Windows does the difference is apparently not 2GB which leaves the Series S with not eniugh RAM to power the game.

      As others mentioned for the Steamdeck Splitscreen was disabled, however that was likely done to save GPU performance, unlike the Series S the Steamdeck has enough RAM (16GB) to meet the minimum requirements.