124 PCWorld DECEMBER 2020HERE’S HOW XBOX SERIES X STOPPED ME BUYING GAMING PC
It’s the equivalent of pressing Skip intro while
watching Netflix. And, until Microsoft adds
Quick Resume to Windows, PCs can’t do this.
(DirectStorage is the Windows API [go.
pcworld.com/dstr] that may make this
happen, though.)
Sure, you might say, how often do I swap
from game to game? That’s not the point—in
certain games, Quick Resume even survived
entirely powering down the console, including
manually shutting off my power strip. It’s
genuinely game-changing to boot the
console—instantly resuming it from a
powered-on state, or booting it from a
powered-down state in just seconds—and
then wait a few seconds more to resume a
game with Quick Resume.About the only odd thing about Quick
Resume right now is that it works best with the
thousands of older Xbox One/360/original
Xbox titles, as Microsoft discovered a bug
with some of its newer, optimized titles. The
other is that jumping back and forth via Quick
Resume occasionally disconnected me from
an online connection—forcing me, for
example, to reconnect to EA’s servers on Star
Wars: Battlefront 2. Rejoining, though, was as
easy as clicking a button.CLOUD GAMING: A LOT
CHEAPER THAN A GAMING
LAPTOP
So if desktop cards are so hard to come by,
why not buy a gaming laptop instead? Well,
for one, mobile GPUs are
still a generation behind
their desktop cousins, so
you won’t be able to buy a
laptop with the mobile
equivalent of Nvidia’s
latest hardware for some
time yet.
Microsoft does offer a
“free” alternative: cloud
gaming, also known as
Project xCloud. Cloud
gaming works in one of
two ways: streaming
games directly from your
console, or else tapping
into Microsoft’s “Xbox inGaming laptops are great, but if you have an active Game Pass Ultimate
subscription, cloud gaming can be a whole lot cheaper.