I spent the past week in the living room on the Xbox Series X. We played a variety of games in this preview unit and tested load times, performance, and some new Series X features. Temporarily switching to the older Xbox One X during testing was like going back to the era of 56k modems from cable internet. The Xbox Series X shows how much you can improve the games you play every day. Everything feels just right.

Since this is a preview console, this first hands-on was limited to focusing on three areas: backwards compatible games, load times, and the new quick resume feature. For the past week, we’ll focus on the impression you’ve had with the Xbox Series X and the solid performance gains you’ve seen in a variety of games. We’ve already covered the initial hardware impressions of both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, as well as the new controller and 1TB expansion card. Learn more about hardware.

The most important and obvious improvement of existing games on Xbox Series X is the significant change in load time. I’ve noticed a reduction in load times for most of all the games I’ve tested in the last week. Games like Sea of ​​thieves, Warframe,and Destiny 2 Series X reduces load times by up to 1 minute or more.

To Destiny 2For example, the Xbox One X takes more than a minute, and the standard Xbox One takes nearly two minutes in total, but now you can load it on an in-game planet in about 30 seconds. These improved load times are the same as my custom PC with a fast NVMe SSD and completely change the way the game is played. Instead of sitting and looking at the loads of the planet, you can perform more quests and tasks.

Warframe And Sea of ​​thieves The loading time is just as impressive. Can open Warframe And the game is ready to play in just 25 seconds. The same load literally takes a minute longer on my Xbox One X. Sea of ​​thieves It will be loaded into the menu screen in about 20 seconds, and will be loaded into the session in another 28 seconds. On my Xbox One X, it takes 1 minute and 21 seconds to load the game first, and then another 1 minute and 12 seconds to enter the game session.

None of these games are fully optimized for the Xbox Series X. This is just Microsoft’s backward compatibility support behavior. I switched to the Xbox One X on a regular basis throughout the week, but it was painful to witness these old load times, which took more than a minute for the game.

Not only will the game load faster, but in many cases the game will also be smoother. Destiny 2 A great example of a game suppressed by the Xbox One X’s weaker CPU and slower HDD. This was a previously native 4K hit title, but the GPU performance of the One X’s 6 teraflops was bottlenecked by laptops-like CPUs and older rotating hard disks. This means that the game stuck at 30fps.

While bungee Working on strengthening Destiny 2 For PS5, which supports Xbox Series X and 60fps, it runs faster without patching. Regularly notice a drop in frame rate Destiny 2 On Xbox One X, when things get a little busy on the screen during a public event or a raid where a swarm of enemies hits you. No stutter is running Destiny 2 Xbox series X

This console has also improved other parts Destiny 2 Slow on Xbox One. On Xbox One X it can take a few seconds to load into the character menu, but on Series X it feels like you’re playing on a PC. These are minor improvements, but they are small games that make the game more enjoyable to play.

I noticed a similar improvement overall Warframe And Sea of ​​thieves, It seems that you are automatically enjoying the benefits of improved CPU, SSD, and GPU for the game to run more smoothly.

Another benefit of the Xbox Series X and this next generation is that the games aren’t separated as they were when migrating from the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One. At the time, many games could only be played against Xbox One players, excluding friends who were still playing on the Xbox 360. In all the multiplayer games we tested in Series X, we were able to join a friend who is using Xbox, playing against one other Xbox One player.

Unfortunately, during this first preview period, we weren’t able to fully test all the games we needed. So it’s still not possible to analyze the performance of different games in more detail. Microsoft initially had about 300 games available on this preview Xbox Series X, but expanded it to over 500 over the weekend.

Could not test titles like Forza Horizon 4 And Grand Theft Auto V As a result, Microsoft seems to carefully unlock the game in this preview program to ensure it runs successfully and does not cause any unexpected issues. None of the games I’ve tested have been fully extended for this new console, so more tests will be done in the coming weeks.

I’m sure wonderful people Digital casting Also, the usual side-by-side comparison of frame rate and performance is done immediately. It will be interesting to see the number of existing games that have been extended to improve the resolution render rate, frame rate, etc.

The Xbox One had a fast resume feature for switching games, but it didn’t seem to work or wasn’t supported by the game. There’s no more difference with the Xbox Series X. With Quick Resume, you can freely exchange multiple games using SSDs in Series X. It took about 5 seconds to restart the game from where it left off, and I was able to easily switch between the five games.

I restarted my Xbox Series X for an update, but all the games resumed immediately. Most of the games I tested worked fine with Quick Resume, but some aren’t supported. Title like Sea of ​​thieves, It features a large multiplayer arena and will not work with new features. However, these games make sense because they can’t quickly resume a live, evolving environment that changes every second.

The limit on the number of games you are trying to restart quickly depends on the game you are actually using. I had no problem switching 5 times, but I ran into a problem where the game failed to restart and had to be restarted. Another title was reopened, but was frozen for a few seconds before it came back. The Xbox Series X I’m using is a prototype preview unit, so I’ll hold the quick resume decision until it’s fully reviewed shortly after launch.

We’re only talking about backwards-compatible games, load times, and quick resumes, so let’s think a little more about the Xbox Series X preview experience. The Xbox Series X felt like playing on the familiar Xbox.

The experience of switching to the Xbox One was truly captivating. Series X feels like it’s just upgraded its iPhone to run existing Xbox games. Everything feels smooth and fast. These games aren’t even optimized for consoles and are already running better, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the really optimized games offer in the coming weeks.

As with all generations of game consoles, it can take months or years to understand what hardware advances will make game design. We are waiting to see how ray tracing will be implemented in next generation games and how many games can deliver up to 120fps at 4K resolution.

True next-generation games are still a mystery, but what I’ve seen from backwards-compatible games over the past week is encouraging. We hope that game developers will be able to significantly reduce bottlenecks on both the Xbox Series X and PS5, resulting in game improvements that can only be seen on the PC side.

A full review of the Xbox Series X and Series S is just around the corner, so stay tuned for more coverage of Microsoft’s next-generation consoles.