A new Xbox update is on the way that will speed up your downloads while you’re playing your favorite games on Xbox Series X|S consoles. The Xbox 2408 update is currently only available to Alpha Skip-Ahead Insiders, but the results reported so far are incredibly promising.
According to the update notes, Xbox has “made additional network optimizations to improve content downloads while the best games are running.” Though it sounds fairly underwhelming at a surface level, personal testing undertaken by Insider ‘Idle Sloth’ reveals a huge improvement.
As per Idle Sloth’s results, “games are now downloading at 380Mbps while games are running” – a monumental improvement over the 40-80Mbps he was getting before. Though it’s not quite on par with the 480Mbps Idle Sloth gets without a game running in the background, the update could be huge for players currently having to choose between playing a game and getting a AAA behemoth downloaded within a week.
There does appear to be some variance, though, depending on what sort of game is being played. Idle Sloth reports that his speeds while playing Brotato – a single-player game – were roughly 100Mbps faster than when playing Call of Duty MW3 online. This is unsurprising considering network bandwidth will always be reserved for online multiplayer, but the net increase is still remarkable.
Of course, the update is only out for Alpha Skip-Ahead Insiders – the earliest build Xbox makes available for testing. This means it could take weeks or months for the changes to arrive, though there’s every chance that further improvements could be made in that time. Regardless, it’s an optimization that we’re excited about and one that you should be too if you regularly face the download dilemma.
For more of the latest Xbox news, check out when you can expect to hear from Phil Spencer and co. on the future of Xbox’s first-party games, as well as the two games recently reported to be going multi-platform first.