On Monday, it was confirmed the Xbox Series X includes a Quick Resume feature for jumping back into games without delay. Now we know it will work even if you reboot your console.
Earlier this week, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer revealed a lot more about what we can expect from the Xbox Series X. But the fine details are now starting to appear. As The Verge reports, in a new podcast hosted by Larry Hryb, better known as Major Nelson, more detail is revealed about the Quick Resume feature and something referred to as "ray traced audio."
Quick Resume allows you to effectively pause the game you are playing and quit out, but then go right back to where you were another time. Microsoft will let you do this for multiple games installed on the Series X. However, what we didn't know until now was that these Quick Resume states will survive a system reboot.
Not only is that incredibly useful if you've finished gaming for the day, but want to pick up where you left off in a few days or even weeks, it also takes some of the pain out of system updates. Typically an update requires a console reboot, but now they won't stop you jumping right back into a game or relying on the in-game save states. And apparently this has all been made possible thanks to the switch to an SSD rather than a hard drive inside the console.
Major Nelson is joined on the podcast by Jason Ronald, Microsoft's director of Xbox program management. He talks about a new feature not mentioned before called "audio ray tracing." He explains, "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."
It's unclear exactly how that will work, but the one clear takeaway is Microsoft intends to offer a much improved audio experience for Series X games. Of course, you'll require good audio hardware or headphones as well as a HDR-capable 4K TV to fully appreciate this next-gen experience.
Further Reading
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