Get ready for an even better game streaming experience with xCloud! Xbox Cloud Gaming, or xCloud the cooler and more common name, continues to be the crown jewel of the Xbox Game Pass experience. Game Pass already allows you access to hundreds of games on either your PC or Xbox at any time, but the addition of xCloud took it to another level by adding the ability to play many of those games on your phone! That ability has even expanded to streaming to other devices as well so you don’t have to download all those games and make room on your hard drive.
While the service has had a lot of success, it hasn’t been without bumps and issues. Controller input latency has been a challenge at times, as well as a lack of support for mouse and keyboard when streaming console games to your PC via xCloud. Well good news for all you mouse and keyboard purists out there, Microsoft is preparing to add that support into xCloud. The addition was teased earlier this year but now Microsoft is encouraging devs to go ahead and add it in for console games to prepare for that option. This will be even more important when the Cloud Gaming library expands later this year.
The bigger update coming to xCloud is the improvements to latency. Nothing feels worse than running off a cliff in game and dying because that jump input didn’t process until after you were off solid ground. To combat this problem and others like it, Direct Capture is being utilized in the new Display Details API to eliminate up to 72ms of latency. For the average person that may sound like it’s not much time, but for most games that is the difference in success or failure. Not to mention it just feels better and more smooth for your experience. Without going too deep into the technical details, this feature basically recreates hardware features within the software so the input goes straight through it rather than through the normal display pipeline. It will be a noticeable improvement that pushes Xbox Cloud Gaming to an even higher standard of quality.
While there’s no firm date that these will go into effect, the fact that developers are already hard at work integrating these systems into place means it won’t be long. If you haven’t given Xbox Cloud Gaming a try yet, I highly recommend it. You can learn more about the service here.
Image from: Xbox
