How Xbox Series X Makes Quick Resume Game Switching Possible

Xbox Series X seems to have plenty of quality-of-life features that make the overall gaming experience better than what current generation consoles offer. While the big hitters are found in hardware such as the super-fast SSD, faster CPU, and stronger graphics processor, smaller system features like Quick Resume can make things more user-friendly. Quick Resume enables games to pause and resume almost instantly, even if another game is also running.

Microsoft previously put out a short video demonstration of Quick Resume in action (see below); essentially, you can pause a game's state, leave it running in the background, and switch over to play another game without any loss in progress. When we spoke with Xbox director of program management Jason Ronald, he gave a bit more detail on how Quick Resume works, saying, "Through the unique design of our operating system and the Xbox Velocity architecture, we can quickly persist the full state of your game when you switch to a different title, even through a console reboot and a system update." He asserted, "The system reserves enough storage space to retain the states of multiple games, allowing almost instant access for the player."

Because of the way Xbox Series X is designed, it's said to be able to retain game states without loss in performance across applications. When asked about limits of Quick Resume and how many game states can be retained at any given time, Ronald responded, "The actual number of titles is variable depending on the size of the game...but we designed the system to be able to support multiple games simultaneously."

When determining how far they'd have to push the tech, he said "that was really based on the player data we have, [which] shows that average users play on average three to four games a month. So, we want to make sure that we can get players back into those games as quickly as possible. But there's not necessarily a hard limit of the number of games."

Quick Resume is just one of the new features coming to Xbox Series X--we also have more details on Smart Delivery, which allows you to play proper versions of certain cross-gen games between Xbox One and Series X with a single purchase. We also have a technical breakdown of how the SSD, CPU, and console architecture can lead to innovative games. You can check out more of our stories on Xbox Series X and the latest Inside Xbox event below.