Microsoft’s Xbox Series X will be able to resume games even after a reboot
Microsoft revealed a number of new specs for its next-gen Xbox Series X game console earlier this week, but the company is dropping fresh hints about features today. In a new podcast, Microsoft’s Larry Hryb reveals that the new quick resume for multiple games will also let Xbox Series X owners resume games after the console has rebooted.
Microsoft used a similar feature on the Xbox One to resume games, but the Xbox Series X will resume multiple games from a suspended state whether you’re rebooting the console, switching games, or resuming from standby.
“I had to reboot because I had a system update, and then I went back to the game and went right back to it,” reveals Hryb in the podcast. “So it survives a reboot.” That will be useful for any dashboard updates that would usually interrupt any progress in a game, and it sets the stage for encouraging player habits of simply switching off a console and not worrying about save points.
Alongside this new detail, Microsoft’s director of Xbox program management, Jason Ronald, teases something called audio ray tracing. It’s not a term that’s typically used right now, but essentially, it’s spatial audio for immersion in Xbox Series X games. “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,” explains Ronald.
Microsoft is planning to dig deeper into the dedicated hardware-acceleration for spatial audio on the Xbox Series X at the Game Developers Conference next month. Senior audio specialists at Microsoft are planning to hold a talk around how Microsoft is collaborating with game designers, Dolby, and others to take advantage of this hardware support.
Microsoft also revealed this week that the Xbox Series X will include 12 teraflops of GPU performance, which is twice what’s available in the Xbox One X and eight times the original Xbox One.
Microsoft revealed a number of new specs for its next-gen Xbox Series X game console earlier this week, but the company is dropping fresh hints about features today. In a new podcast, Microsoft’s Larry Hryb reveals that the new quick resume for multiple games will also let Xbox Series X…
