If you're a keen reader of Pure Xbox, you might remember that back in December we highlighted a feature that was rolling out to Xbox Insiders, telling you when you were unintentionally throttling your download speeds.
Now, that feature is available for everyone thanks to a recent update, and you'll see the warning message when you've got a game running in the background while trying to download new games and update titles in your library.
Fortunately, this only affects the most recent game you've been playing, so you can still have games stored in Quick Resume on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S for other titles - just not the one you've most recently played.
To avoid throttling your download speeds, all you need to do is make sure you quit out of the current game you're playing by pressing the Menu button and scrolling down to 'Quit'. Then, the message will disappear!
Have you noticed this feature? What do you think of it? Let us know down in the comments.
Comments 24
What they need to do is improve the download speeds. The download speed for PS5 is way faster than Series X.
@Snake_V5
It's not. Shut down your games.
@lokozar My games are shut down when I download. I even saw another guy doing a review say the same thing.
@Carck
Correct.
@Snake_V5
Go to your dashboard or better games section, highlight the game, hit the menu button, chose "quit". Do this for every game running, check again. If that doesn't help, something else is wrong with your system/connection ... and the system/connection of "THAT guy".
@lokozar All I'm saying is is that from everything I've heard, it seems to be said that the download speeds are faster on PS5 than Series X. It's something that's better on PS5 and known. When I mentioned the other guy, I meant even he said that download speeds are faster on PS5 and he owns both. Nothing to do with shutting games down etc.
It was the same for me when I had PS4 and Xbox One X, the PS4 had faster download speeds.
Could the difference be that the Xbox installs the game in a way that allows you to play before the whole game is downloaded? A game I was downloading the other day let me play when it was around 75% done. Not actually sure if PlayStation 4 or 5 does this this; I recall the PS3 used to download the game, then install it separately.
@Snake_V5
No. What you're saying is, you chose to ignore that other people like Carck and me report that for us the download speeds on Xbox are perfectly fine. That means, that for people like you, there is something wrong with your device, settings, or connection setup/route. Could have dozens of causes. You would have to check in depth. But it's easier to just blame MS, I guess.
All I'm saying is, that your initial comment was wrong ...
@dmcc0
It's more likely, that MS's approach is different than Sony's. I guess MS wants to make sure, that the game which is running always has enough bandwidth to function without hiccups - while the system does not really look at actual network metrics. Additionally, big network activities can subtract from the CPU's performance. I think, they just prioritise the general performance of running games.
@Snake_V5 Really? Because I was always seeing/hearing/reading how PS4 download speeds were garbage.
I spent most of last gen on PS4/PS4 Slim. When I switched to a base Xbox One (not even an S or X, and one that my wife had had since launch day, I might add), I was amazed how much quicker than PS4 it was.
@lokozar Just because your connection is fine doesn't change the fact that it is known that download speeds are faster on PS5 than Series X. I've seen a lot of comparison videos and most of them have all said said same thing, we all can't be wrong if we're all saying it. Obviously the PSN is different to the Xbox network, Sony must have optimised it more than Microsoft.
Your Xbox download speeds may be faster than PS5 sure, I'm talking as a whole.
@VenomousAlbino Honestly, my PS4 speeds were faster than Xbox One X speeds. I never understood why people always said the opposite when it was backwards for me. And I can assure you there isn't anything wrong with my network or ISP or anything like that. I have gigabit speeds.
@Snake_V5
The hell ...? You cannot say Xbox download speed is slower than PS when there are people who have no problems at all. The download speed of ... YOUR ... Xbox is slower, and that must have very specific reasons.
It doesn't matter if others chime in. They then just have specific problems as well. There is a significant difference between "general" and "individual".
You telling us everything is fine on your end, because you have "gigabit speeds", just shows how narrow your view on the network topic is. It convinces me that you did not have a closer look and just brush everything off. MS won't cast a spell to fix your porblems.
@Carck That's a good point; the PS3 download speeds were even worse than PS4.
@lokozar I love my series X, but have experienced similar slow speeds. Both PS5 and series X hard wired, games all closed, and the speed jumps from 50 mbps to 300 mbps. The PS does seem to go faster. Doesn’t bug me, as the download does go fast either way.
Could be the other commenters and I are the the exception, or you are. Either way, seems like a non-issue and the difference of 10 min of my life when downloading a 70 gig game, which isn’t often.
@Bdbrady
Look, I'm not disputing, that you see differences, but if someone claims "all swans are white", the statement immediately becomes untrue as soon as a black swan enters the stage.
Do you really believe (e.g.) Carck's, Albino's and my devices are faulty, and thus perform the exact same or even better than the PS? Does that make sense to you? I'm telling you, that something is amiss for everyone who experiences Xbox being slower than PS. Question is "What exactly?" That could be any number of things, really.
This is definitely helpful. I still dislike just HOW slow downloads are on the XSX versus PS5 while games are running, but at least it tells you it's happening.
To the naysayers, it's true, with no games running, XSX and PS5 can both saturate 400mb/s-600mb/s easily. With games running XSX downloads at like 25mb/s tops. PS5 doesn't slow down. OTOH PS5 only tops out at like 400mb/s for me, so XSX has better top speed but is basically 2004 while games are running. PS5 is consistently 2012 with or without games running.
Both consoles let you start playing after a certain portion is downloaded.
If I recall the main difference is that PS5 has separate hardware for decompression, so installing and unpacking the archive doesn't use the main CPU. XSX uses the main CPU, so if it blocks off most of the hardware for the game to use, it's not available to give to downloads.
I have 350Mbps broadband and get pretty much consistent 48MB ps on my PC. On XSX the speed is up and down more times than a yoyo. Normally in the range of 180-300+
Wow these comments always crack me up. I’m not here to help much but obviously MS need to have better speeds to help everyone download game pass games because there ain’t much else on offer 😜
X Box Live is always slow as heck when downloading a game after you buy it from X Box Live.
I mostly stick with the eshop for Nintendo Switch and for my Nintendo 3DS since downloading/installing the games that i buy they download quicker and not take a whole frikkin day like the X Box does
I've had Xbox One X & PS4 Pro and Xbox was at least 2-3x faster to download anything UNLESS you had a game running, then PS4 was about 10% quicker.
On my Xbox Series X & PS5 it's about 2:1 in favor of Series X unless (again) there's a game running.
I'm on fiber. Sony's internet infrastructure has been mostly trash since the earliest PS3 days. They've made some improvements here and there but it's just barely better than Nintendo's when it comes to download speeds.
I’m sure I’ve seen downloads as high as 650mbps on my series x from my 900mbps connection. But my isp does throttle Xbox downloads to around 25-40mbps on the evenings. Which sucks.
Excellent, I’ve found the speeds to be pretty good over WiFi, only issue I’ve had is stuttering in COD MW, but it seems to be my router more then anything else, or maybe a bug with the game?
Your ISP and contention ratio also plays a huge part in your speeds, if your ISP is over subscribed nothing MS can do to help you. I only get 70mbps but I’m with a snake ISO with low contention ratio, so I get that speed all the time.
@swedetrap Sony's internet infrastructure is..... Microsoft, now, though....
My xbox series x download games @ 1Gbps or 100MB/s if that's worse than the ps5... Maybe ps4 has a 10Gps port and nobody knew!
The Xbox seems to have a very strange display of speed for me, it will sit there apparently not doing anything at all for a minute or two then will claim it is downloading at 2 or 3 times the maximum speed of the connection and then back to (apparently) nothing again.
The strange thing is the Xbox is maxing out my connection (granted that is only a 60mbit connection.)
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