Microsoft is hustling up its Xbox Series X / S consoles’ boot time. In the latest Xbox Insider test figures of the Xbox dashboard, the cold boot startup time has been decreased by around 5 seconds.
Additionally, Microsoft could speed up the boot series by assembling a shorter bootup animation.
Xbox testers recently noticed a faster bootup time, and Microsoft approved the changes on Friday. Josh Munsee, director of Xbox integrated marketing, expresses that the company built “a shorter bootup animation (~4s) from the original bootup animation (~9s), helping to lower the overall startup time.”
Xbox Series X / S users will only profit from the speedier boot times if their consoles are assigned to Energy Saver mode instead of Standby mode. Energy Saver mode means the console fully powers off instead of entering a standby state. Of course, it means you can’t power on the console and instantly start playing, but Energy Saver is more familiar with electricity bills and the planet.
Microsoft’s changes will make it quicker to boot up in Energy Saver mode, taking the Xbox Series X / S boot process from 20 to 15 seconds. In addition, it makes the Energy Saver mode even more attractive, especially after Microsoft drove it the default option for new Xbox consoles earlier this year. It also adds support for downloading updates in the background.
The high-end model was first knocked during E3 2019 under the label “Project Scarlett,” its name and layout as Xbox Series X was revealed during The Game Awards later in December. Finally, in September 2020, Microsoft unveiled the Xbox Series S’s lower-end model.
The Xbox Series X holds higher-end hardware and supports higher display resolutions (up to 8K resolution), increased frame rates, and real-time ray tracing; it also has a high-speed solid-state drive (SSD) to decrease loading times.
The less expensive Xbox Series S employs the same CPU, but a less potent GPU has smaller memory and internal storage and lacks an optical drive. Both consoles are designed to support essentially all Xbox One games, controllers, and accessories, including those games from older Xbox consoles supported by Xbox One’s backward compatibility.
At launch, Microsoft positioned their first-party games and several third-party games to be available for both Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One to help transition between generations. In addition, it provides the “Smart Delivery” distribution framework to freely provide further optimizations of an Xbox One game for either the Xbox Series X or Series S.
The consoles are also compatible with the gaming subscription service Xbox Game Pass and the cloud game-streaming platform Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Xbox Cloud Gaming is Microsoft’s Xbox cloud gaming service. Initially unleashed in beta testing in November 2019, the service was later established for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers on September 15, 2020. Xbox Game Pass cloud gaming is delivered to subscribers of Ultimate at no additional cost.
The concepts for the cloud service came from Microsoft around 2016 when Kareem Choudhry conceived the Xbox 360 backward compatibility for the Xbox One. As his team formulated this solution, Choudhry also wondered if they could deliver these games without requiring a console and got Spencer’s go-ahead to start a small group to decide the feasibility of cloud gaming.
The technology was successful enough around Xbox Game Pass’s introduction that Microsoft assembled a bigger team to build the cloud gaming platform.
Microsoft struck the service at E3 2018 and formally declared Project xCloud many months later, in October 2018. They explained the service in March 2019 with the racing tournament Forza Horizon 4 playing on Android mobile with an Xbox One controller.
Xbox chief Phil Spencer used a private server during this time to try games on a remote connection. The service joined its home testing phase in May 2019, when it could be employed outside the lab. It documented public testing later in the year and was revealed at E3 2019.
Microsoft said its Xbox content library would make its service more appealing than competitors like Stadia. The hardware at takeoff used Xbox One S-based blade servers but started to transition to Xbox Series X-based servers in June 2021. Each server originally had four customized Xbox One S-based units for the 2018 teaser, but this was duplicated to eight per server in a 2U section for the service’s launch in 2019.
Analogized to the standard Xbox One S, power consumption has been decreased by 30% through processor-specific power tuning. In addition, video output is fixed to 120 Hz to minimize latency.
Hardships of the service started in October 2019. The service hosts 50 games, with aid in testing for Apple Inc.’s iOS mobile devices and Sony Interactive Entertainment’s DualShock controllers. In addition, Microsoft released Xbox Cloud Gaming across 21 countries in North America and Europe, as well as South Korea, on September 15, 2020, for the best Android devices, with support for additionally than 150 games at launch.
Xbox Cloud Gaming was unleashed in its beta layout for Windows users on August 9, 2021, as a bonus of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. However, it also directed users to be registered in the Xbox Insider program. It was officially dismissed as part of the Xbox app for Windows on September 14, 2021, along with Remote Play aid from Xbox consoles to a Windows computer.
Additionally, Microsoft introduced a Clarity Boost feature for Windows users through the Edge browser that supplies client-side visual modifications to the streamed content.
Microsoft started rolling out testing of Xbox Cloud Gaming for Xbox One consoles on trial channels in October 2021, permitting users on those consoles to play Xbox Series X/S games.