Xbox Series X and S Boot Up Five Seconds Faster Following Update – CNET [CNET]

All it took was speeding up the start-up animation.

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 have seen a five-second improvement, largely thanks to a speedier start-up 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 also see faster boot times, 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 also 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, energy-saving mode would take around 20 seconds to start up, but the new update brings it 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 non-profit 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 500MW 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.