Is there anything worse than waiting ages to resume your game after rebooting your console? Admittedly yes, but it's still annoying – and it apparently won't be a problem with the Xbox Series X, after an announcement from Microsoft revealed a new time-saving feature for the soon-to-be-released console.
It's called Quick Resume, and it will allow you resume your game straight away, even after you reboot your Xbox Series X – which could be incredibly handy if you need to do a quick system update in the middle of a gaming session.
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We first found out about Quick Resume on February 24, when Microsoft revealed a whole load of Xbox Series X Specs, including Smart Delivery, which will ensure you have the correct version of a game, no matter which Xbox console you've bought it on.
The announcement from Microsoft explained: "The new Quick Resume feature lets you continue multiple games from a suspended state almost instantly, returning you to where you were and what you were doing, without waiting through long loading screens.”
Jump straight in
In a recent podcast, Xbox Live's director of programming Larry Hryb talked about his own experience using the new feature, saying: “I had to reboot because I had a system update, and then I went back to the game and went right back to it. So it survives a reboot.”
As well as preserving your progress during a reboot, Quick resume will let you switch between games instantly, a little like how you can jump into apps that are sleeping in the background on your phone.
Fellow podcast guest, Xbox's director of program management Jason Ronald, teased the audio ray tracing feature we're expecting to hear more about at GDC 2020. He explained:
“With the introduction of hardware accelerated ray tracing with the Xbox series X, we’re actually able to enable a whole new set of scenarios, whether that’s more realistic lighting, better reflections, we can even use it for things like spatial audio and have ray traced audio.”
This feature was revealed when a description of a GDC 2020 presentation that will be held on March 18 by Microsoft's Senior Technical Audio Specialist Robert Ridihalgh, stated that "newer generation Xbox consoles" will sport "dedicated hardware-acceleration".
Hardware acceleration is the use of a special processor to speed up certain tasks – much like the 3D audio chip that PS5 architect Mark Cerny has confirmed will come with the next-gen PlayStation.
That means that the Xbox Series X could feature the kind of immersive spatial audio that we're expecting to see in the also soon-to-be-released Sony PS5, pitting the two upcoming consoles against each other with even more intensity. Here's hoping the PlayStation 5 will have it's own time-saving feature to compete with Microsoft's Quick Resume.
Via The Verge
