The Xbox Series X will get you into games up to four times faster than you can currently manage, and swap between a handful of titles near instantly.
Although journalists can't review the Xbox Series X in full, and have not yet got to try any Xbox Series X games, their recently released previews have allowed us to get an idea of the console's backward compatibility and software and interface features.
- Xbox Series X release date, price, pre-orders, specs and games
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The Verge's Tom Warren says the overall user experience is still similar to the outgoing generation, but describes swapping from the Series X to an Xbox One X during his preview "like going from cable internet back to the days of a 56k modem." If you weren't online in the late '90s, then believe us when we say that's a lot slower.
Warren recorded the load times for several games on the Series X and One X, and they make for interesting reading. While the games haven't been optimized for the Series X yet, load times are reduced across the board, between 25% and 80% depending on the game. The most impressive from the list was The Outer Worlds, which went from a 27 second loading time to a 6 second loading time.
Michael Higham from GameSpot recorded similarly impressive numbers. In his testing, Red Dead Redemption loaded in 38 seconds on the Xbox Series X compared to 2 minutes and 8 seconds on Xbox One X, while Control booted in just 10 seconds compared to nearly a minute on Xbox One X.
Game smoothness has also improved thanks to the increased power available in the newer console. The Xbox One X produces 6 TFLOPs of graphical computing power, while the Series X produces over 12 TFLOPs. As a result playing games like Destiny 2 was much more enjoyable according to Warren, feeling more like playing on PC than a console.
Quick resume also sounds particularly handy. Advancing from the current generation's ability to jump back into games as soon as you turn the console back on, you can now suspend multiple games and jump between them, up to five without any noticeable slowdown during testing. This can't be used with all games, because some have disabled the feature due to their multiplayer focus, such as Sea of Thieves.
We'll have to wait a bit longer to find out what playing a launch title on the Xbox Series X is like, but hopefully not too long. Since the console goes on sale on November 10, you'll be able to find out yourself in just over a month. In the meantime, Xbox will no doubt continue to drip-feed journalists with more teasers like this, showing off why it's the console to pick over the PS5.
