Xbox Series X Will Significantly Reduce Load Times for Backwards-Compatible Games

Xbox Series X owners who want to revisit their catalog of backwards-compatible games after playing through new ones like Halo Infinite will experience those games with “significant reductions in in-game load times,” according to Microsoft. That part of the Xbox Series X’s backwards compatibility features was highlighted in a breakdown of the new Xbox‘s capabilities shared this week with the entire post from Microsoft centered around playing games from the Xbox One and even before that on the new console. Other features were also addressed, but the lower load times will likely be one of the ones that players are able to notice most of all.

Underneath the reassuring section of Xbox’s backwards compatibility breakdown that said all games would play better than before on the Xbox Series X, Jason Ronald, the director of program management for the new console, said backwards-compatible games would run at “peak performance” on the system. Ronald continued to say many games would run even better than they did initially in terms of resolution, visual quality, and load times. Anecdotally, he added that playing through his backlog of games on the Xbox Series X showed that all of them from the Xbox One or before play best on the new console.

“This means that all titles run at the peak performance that they were originally designed for, many times even higher performance than the games saw on their original launch platform, resulting in higher and more steady framerates and rendering at their maximum resolution and visual quality,” Ronald said after explaining that these games will run natively on the Xbox Series X without any needs for boost mode or similar features. “Backwards compatible titles also see significant reductions in in-game load times from the massive leap in performance from our custom NVME SSD which powers the Xbox Velocity Architecture. As I play through my personal backlog as part of our internal testing, all of the incredible games from Xbox One and earlier play best on Xbox Series X.”

Beyond the significantly reduced load times, backwards-compatible titles will also support HDR through a new feature which automatically adds HDR settings to titles “with zero impact to the game’s performance” even if HDR wasn’t even around when those games were released. The Quick Resume feature will also work with backwards-compatible games.

The Xbox Series X is scheduled to launch some time during Holiday 2020.