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Gamers are about to get some of their valuable time back – Xbox Series X and Series S consoles now have faster boot times, Microsoft confirmed on Twitter Saturday.
Boot times improved by five seconds thanks to a speedier startup animation. Xbox’s director of integrated marketing Josh Munsee tweeted about the improvement over the weekend.
Can confirm – worked with @harrisonhoffman and @jakerose27 to create a shorter boot up animation (~4s) from the original boot up animation (~9s), helping to reduce the overall startup time.
— Josh Munsee (@joshmunsee) July 23, 2022
Last-generation Xbox One consoles will speed up as well, according to Xbox senior product manager Jake Rosenberg, who tweeted: “Not only is the animation shorter, but Xbox One generation consoles are booting noticeably faster with these changes!”
Xbox Series X and S owners can set their consoles to two different standby modes. One is energy-saving, which turns off the console completely. The other is an instant-on mode, leaving the console on but at a low-energy state. Before the energy-saving mode change, the console bootup took 20 seconds, but the new update brought that down to 15. Instant-on, as the name suggests, would load up an Xbox almost instantly.
The company made improvements to energy-saving mode earlier this year, allowing gamers to download games in the background.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization, said in a report last year that Xbox’s low-power standby mode would cost American owners an estimated $500 million in energy bills over the next five years. That’s the equivalent of a year’s worth of energy produced by a large 500-megawatt coal-burning power plant, adding an additional 3 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere, according to the NRDC.
Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.