Featured Image Credit: Phil Barker/Future Publishing/Chesnot/Getty Images
There's nothing worse than buying a new game and having to wait hours for your console to actually download it.
It's not even just new games, nowadays - too often, the start of a gaming session is interrupted by the discovery of some huge 20GB update file that needs to be installed before you can join in with your pals.
Some Xbox gamers have had it particularly bad for quite a while now, reporting a weird bottleneck when downloading something.
If you turn your Xbox Series X or Series S on and start a download, then leave it open without playing a game or anything, you'll get some nice fast download speeds - basically only limited by the speed of your connection.
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However, if you open a game and start playing, you might find the download speed gets throttled way back to around 40-80MB/s - still an OK speed, but potentially way lower than it could be.
This can mean that you have no choice but to sit and twiddle your thumbs if you want a download to happen quickly, which is pretty boring.
Thankfully, though, it looks like a new Xbox software update is coming to make a huge difference on this front, at long last.
The software update, which is currently only available to certain beta testers but will eventually arrive for everyone, mentioned in its patch notes that download experiences have been improved.
Xbox influencer Idle Sloth posted on X (formerly Twitter) to share some tests they ran with downloads and games open, and the results are stark.
(FYI) I've done some tests and games are now downloading at 380mbs while games are running.
— Idle Sloth💙💛 (@IdleSloth84_) February 12, 2024
Usually games download at 480mbs with no game running in the background.
What a great improvement from 40-80mbs, well done to the Xbox engineering team 👏 https://t.co/2ZfCCByINO pic.twitter.com/EA9yHLSVbh
They were able to get a download going at 380MB/s with a game running, a massive improvement on the previous situation, and way closer to their normal download rate of around 480MB/s.
This is great news for any Xbox owners and means that you should be sure to get your console updated as soon as possible once the patch comes out more widely.
Of course, this is going to be a very interesting week for Xbox even before this welcome update, since the leadership team is on the cusp of explaining its new strategy moving forward. The information will come in the form of a special podcast episode and could have seismic ramifications, including the potential for Xbox exclusives like Starfield to come to PS5 at some point.
