Microsoft’s new flagship console appears to be quite the speed demon when it comes to getting games up and running. The Verge compared nine titles today and discovered that the Xbox Series X obliterates the loading performance of its predecessor, the Xbox One X, by as much as 69 seconds.
You can check out the table below for the complete results, but we found The Outer Worlds particularly interesting. Apparently, the Xbox Series X can load Obsidian’s sci-fi RPG in as little as six seconds. The console also finishes loading Sea of Thieves, Warframe, and Destiny 2 over one minute faster than the previous flagship.
Xbox Series X Load Times
| Game | Xbox Series X | Xbox One X |
|---|---|---|
| CoD: Warzone | 16 seconds | 21 seconds |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | 52 seconds | 1 min, 35 seconds |
| The Outer Worlds | 6 seconds | 27 seconds |
| Evil Within 2 | 33 seconds | 43 seconds |
| Sea of Thieves | 20 seconds | 1 min, 21 seconds |
| Warframe | 25 seconds | 1 min, 31 seconds |
| AC: Odyssey | 30 seconds | 1 min, 7 seconds |
| No Man’s Sky | 1 min, 27 seconds | 2 mins, 13 seconds |
| Destiny 2 | 43 seconds | 1 min, 52 seconds |
“In Destiny 2, for example, I can now load into a planet in the game in around 30 seconds, compared to over a minute later on an Xbox One X and nearly two minutes in total on a standard Xbox One,” The Verge’s Tom Warren wrote. “These improved load times are identical to my custom-built PC that includes a fast NVMe SSD, and they genuinely transform how you play the game — you can get more quests and tasks done instead of sitting and looking at a planet loading.”
“Warframe and Sea of Thieves are equally impressive with their load times now,” he added. “I can now open Warframe and the game is ready to play just 25 seconds later. That same load takes literally a minute longer on my Xbox One X. Sea of Thieves now loads to menu screens in around 20 seconds, with another 28 seconds to load into a session. On my Xbox One X, it takes a minute and 21 seconds to even load the game initially, and then another minute and 12 seconds to get into a game session.”
These incredible improvements in loading times are largely owed to Microsoft’s new Xbox Velocity Architecture, which comprises an NVMe SSD, hardware-accelerated decompression, the DirectStorage API, and Sampler Feedback Streaming. The custom storage solution delivers 2.4 GB/s of raw I/O throughput.