It looks like the Xbox Series S is facing serious memory allocation issues in Borderlands 3 , at least according to Reddit user u/jokekiller94 — who posted a screenshot of the game crashing on their Series S console with an "out of memory" error on the screen.

The issue isn't limited to the original poster — Reddit user u/bacon_sammer responded in the thread, saying they have the same issue with Borderlands 3 crashing frequently on their Xbox Series S. They said the game runs fine on the Xbox Series X, however, so the it seems to be a Series S issue.

Sadly, this type of memory allocation issue is not uncommon for Microsoft's little console. According to reports from Digital Foundry and The Verge , the Series S' small memory capacity is a headache for developers to optimize around. It is the single biggest contributing factor to the console's lower graphical settings and lack of ray-tracing effects on Series S ports, and it bottlenecks the console's already weak 4 Teraflop (PS4 Pro level) GPU.

Apparently, complaints among developers regarding the Series S' memory became so extreme that Microsoft released a dev kit in June 2022 that gave developers more manipulation over the Series S' memory system.

The Xbox Series S is Microsoft's most recent entry-level console running on AMD's modern Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures. The console features a 4TF AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 20 compute units clocked at 1550MHz, a 512GB NVMe SSD, and 10GB of GDDR6 memory that is shared between the CPU and the GPU. Strangely, the memory bandwidth is mixed, with 8GB featuring 224GB/s of bandwidth and the other 2GB running at a paltry 56GB/s.

The 10GB memory capacity is why the Series S' memory allocation issues are so problematic. Modern-day PC titles generally recommend at least 16 GB of system RAM , plus at least 6GB to 8GB of VRAM for playing games at high settings. The Series S' unified memory system does reduce a game's memory requirements compared to a PC, but 10GB is still a pretty small number for modern-day gaming (not to mention the unorthodox bandwidth configuration, where only 8GB runs at high speeds).

Thankfully, the memory allocation errors don't appear to be a widespread issue, and hopefully Borderlands 3's developers will fix this problem in a future patch. But the Xbox Series S' overall longevity does not look good given its past and present memory capacity issues.