On stage at E3 2018 today Ashley Spicher, head of engineering at Xbox, announced a new FastStart feature for Xbox. Fast Start is a new feature in the Xbox June Update which will help you launch select Xbox games up to two times faster.
The feature leverages the power of Microsoft’s machine learning and is designed to get better over time. According to Microsoft, FastStart also identifies which files are needed to begin playing and prioritizes the download of those files first. All gamers will need to do to enjoy is find a FastStart-enabled title, and hit ‘Download’ and let Xbox do the rest.
Jason Ronald, Principal Group Program Manager, Xbox Platform, explained the feature a bit more in a subsequent blog post.
While FastStart does not speed up download times, by identifying which files are needed to begin gameplay and prioritizing the download of those files first, you can expect to jump into your game, on average, twice as fast as you did previously. That means if a game previously took 30 minutes to download and play, you will now be able to begin gameplay after just 15 minutes.
It’s important to note that games will still download at the same speeds based on your bandwidth. You’ll also need an internet connection with at least a 20Mbps download speed to take advantage of FastStart. Only a select number of titles will support FastStart at launch, and more games in more languages will get support over time for other Xbox Game Pass and Xbox markets.