Gaming on Windows Just Changed Forever

25 years ago Microsoft teamed up with Dwayne the Rock Johnson to announce the Xbox and it was a powerhouse with a Pentium 3 processor and cutting -edge GeForce graphics alongside a lean, mean, slimmed -down Windows -based operating system that helped to push that hardware to its absolute limit.Which got everybody asking, why can't Windows be like that on my computer?And that was back then, when Windows RAM usage idled in the megabytes.Now you're lucky if you can get it under four gigs.And for what?Even the venerable start menu has morphed into a bloated React -based web app.

So what, I can Bing search my file names?The good news is, this seems to be changing.Thanks in no small part to the incredible contributions that Valve has made to Linux PC gaming, they have done what no one else could and forced Microsoft to finally address the elephant in the room.And, to Microsoft's credit, they've done it with Windows Xbox Mode, a lean, mean toggle that you can just flip to strip away the bloat and just focus on gaming.You don't even need a keyboard and mouse anymore to navigate.It's all controller all the time, baby, at least in theory.

In practice, Xbox mode might not be quite all it's cracked up to be.So before you fire it up and take a look, why don't we go through it together and have a look at the labs testing that our team did to see just how much bloat they managed to remove.One bit of bloat they couldn't remove is this segue to our sponsor.

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Performance aside, a key benefit of Xbox mode is the ability to get a console -like experience in a device that we already own.So why don't we see how seamless it really is, starting by signing in.Which, this is not actually what I was expecting.Oh, okay, we need to use a pin.There we go, okay.With the pin, yeah!

Yeah, this is pretty cool.So there's bindings for your D -pad, your shoulder buttons, and your face buttons so that you can quickly enter your pin with a controller.Freaking love to see it.And we're in, oh, man, it's good to see that logo again.Obviously not everyone wants to be launched straight into a gaming interface, but if you do, it's as simple as toggling your system to launch directly into Xbox mode.I've actually been using this for a while on my battery modded ROG Ally, and it's really nice how much stuff you can do now directly with your controller rather than relying on a keyboard and mouse.

That's not to say that you can do everything.And in fact, apparently they've put together some challenges for me.Are you going to give me the keyboard in case I fail?

You're going to have to get the keyboard yourself.It's on that shelf up there if you can reach it.But if you touch it, you fail.

Up here, I got my settings, where I can manage my subscriptions, because they really want you doing that.This is nice, this is where you manage your library.This is probably one of the best things about the Xbox experience.I know it's been done a hundred times in the past, but this is probably the most seamless that I've seen all of my multiple game libraries just automagically consolidated.First thing they want me to do is adjust system volume.Well...

All I said was I didn't have to touch the keyboard normally I would I would have my you know system remote So I think I want okay.All right.All right.I'll try not cheating I have to admit I've never tried to do this.My ally just has volume buttons on it.So, okay Audio, I mean I can see the point you're trying to make that does seem like a fairly straightforward thing but also

I can see why it's not built in, because in almost no situation where I'm using a full screen experience would I necessarily need to adjust the volume.Then again, Steam Big Picture can do it, so.Is there a way to do it?Am I just missing it?There is a way to do it.Did they pull an Apple?

Did they pull an Apple?Change system settings.Oh yeah, buddy.Oh yeah, buddy.Let's go.This is not the way.

That's not the way that we expected, but that works.This is, apparently this is not the way.Okay.Is it in the game bar?I bet it's in the game bar.Audio.

Boom.Boom.There it is.It's in the game bar.Found not one, but two ways.Accessibility.

and the game bar.I gotta confess that even in the Xbox experience, the game bar remains one of those aspects of using Windows that I just find high friction with.All right, now I gotta connect to a Wi -Fi network.Yeah, once again, I guess it's gonna want me to use the game bar for this.Oh yeah, buddy.

Oh yeah, buddy.

Okay, get it together, Microsoft.This can't be a thing when I got this.I'm not touching it though.I'm gonna get close.

but I'm not touching it.

Can't see what I'm doing here.Oh man, where the devil's the...Oh, okay, here.What if I click it?Okay, there.Yeah, let's go.

Oh yeah, buddy.Next challenge.

Try running hardware info.

I'm gonna assume that I can like add it as a game.Let's go.We'll play the hell out of that game.Okay, was that something you guys were expecting?Yes.Oh more options edit.

Oh Okay Close No, I do not want file picker close there.Okay.All right.I cut out of that without touching the keyboard Okay, I saw a thing here more options edit.This is an appOkay.

Yes.Okay.That's fine.That's fine.Close.Okay.

And this is possible, right?

Yeah.

Okay.It's possible.Apparently Microsoft is adding a joystick to mouse thing, but it hasn't rolled out to everybody.I don't know what version of this they installed.Is there like a hardware info widget or something?Remember this is a game.

What does that mean?Gamepad cursor.Oh, there it is.Oh, sick.Oh, we're flying now, but now I can do anything.I mean, yeah, that should work.

I don't know, sick.Do you mean to count?Is this really not gonna work?The request is not supported.

There's a way to do it inside of Xbox.

There's a way to do it inside of Xbox.Bring up a keyboard, you butt.Do I really have to turn off gamepad cursor in order to get a keyboard?Stupid.Well, HW info is not in here.Let me cook, let me cook.

Wait, what is this?I mean, sure, let's try that.Okay, I'm installing it, sure.I'll install it better than you guys did and then it will open.Launch hardware info, here we go.Yes, let's go.

Hardware info launched.All right, next challenge, open lttstore .com.Well, this is gonna be too easy now.Oh, shut up.Not a big fan of how I don't get a keyboard when I have this enabled, but this is still in beta.

I'm sure they're figuring that out.Well, here's a clunky way to do it.

And was that how you expected me to do it?Honestly, no.Your solution was pretty different from everything that Labs has done to solve these.

Now let's stop doing challenges and let's see how seamless it is launching a game, starting with Cyberpunk.This is a Steam game, clearly.I think you guys just saw that.launch.And this is kind of a worst case scenario because it's got like a third party launcher thing and Steam and the Xbox experience that you have to kind of fight your way through.I can also see that they helpfully reset it back to the initial launch experience where you have to like dismiss various pop -ups and whatnot.

But here we are.Oh, come on.Boom.We're in.Consider your mainframe hacked.All right, I got one more challenge.

Try enabling the game bar performance overlay.Bonus point.Options, options.Okay, here's all the metrics and everything.Microsoft, honest bit of feedback.The world does not need more iPhone -like experiences.

Let's let back just be back, not goodbye everything.Home button is home button.Back button is back button.Okay, this is interesting.Okay, I've never seen it break like this before.Shoot, I may have entered an unrecoverable state here.

I can't believe I'm gonna lose going for the bonus point.Okay, hold on, no, no, hold on.No, I don't wanna pin YouTube to the task bar.Not now, Windows.This is exactly what people are using Xbox mode to avoid, Microsoft.Ah, ah, hold on, hold on.

I just need to get my mouse back if I can get my mouse back.I'm good to go.Oh, I got my cursor Okay, okay.Okay.Apparently I was on the right path when I did this like it's got to be here.Oh, yeah

this again.For crying out loud.We're in the performance widget.Hello?Come on.Okay, so it's pinned.

It's compact.Yeah, and like...Reopen Cyberpunk?Reopen it?Wait, what the?What the crap?

That's the way to do...That's crazy.So if I pin it and I have that, then it will work?It should just work.That's crazy.You know what, it doesn't matter.

I think at this point we've done enough to talk about the overall experience.Seamless, no.Somewhat intuitive, no.Actually, other than the bugs, I would say they're mostly on the right path.For the third time now, promise this is the last time I'm gonna mention it, they need to fix home and back functionality to be a clear home and back experience within the Xbox app.Other than that, bringing up the Xbox app interface, overall, pretty navigable.

They do have to get some functionality from the non -compact mode baked into compact, but overall, In most of these cases, I can really see where they're going with it.Keyboard pop -ups do need to be usable when you're using the cursor.Okay, there is quite a lot that needs to be addressed.But on the bright side, booting directly into Xbox mode saved us about seven seconds of startup time.And we also found that by killing the desktop UI, on idle we're saving some memory compared to running standard full -bloat windows with the Xbox app on top of it.Now let's see if there's anything to gain while gaming.

Under my desk are two systems.

The one on the left is running Xbox mode, and the one on the right is using Steam Big Picture mode on top of regular old Windows 11.We're using Forza Horizon 5 because we wanted a very mature, native Game Pass game to give Xbox mode its best possible shot.Both of our systems are running a 9600X paired with a 5060 Ti and 16 gigs of RAM.So these are exactly the kinds of mid -range but modern systems where we might expect some gains.Let's fire it up, shall we?Both are running their own overlays, so we can't really compare these, but what we can compare is the results page at the end.

So one moment, please.

And they're the same.Or rather they're not the same, but as we've talked about in the past, even if you buy the exact same hardware these days, because of dynamic frequency scaling, one system can perform a little different from another.And this one is about 3 % faster than this one.So it's a wash, which is a little disappointing.to be honest with you.We can actually prove this, by the way.

Now everything's running in the background.Here, we can run it one more time.Now it's running full fat Windows.And there you go.Not what we were hoping for, but hey, maybe it's different on some of the other titles that Labs tested.

Spoiler, maybe it's not.

The Labs team tested at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions.And starting with F124 at ultra high preset with RT and VRS disabled, Yeah, my thoughts exactly.We once again see no performance gains.And making matters worse, in exchange for this big fat zero performance gain, labs noticed occasional issues, including window focusing problems, and even instances where F1 refused to boot in full screen mode at all.And unfortunately, Doom the Dark Ages went no better.On medium presets with no upscaling, we found nothing.

No performance benefit between Xbox mode and the standard experience within the Abyssal Forest benchmark.A result that was repeated yet again in Cyberpunk 2077 at the ultra preset with no upscaling and ray tracing off.Making matters worse, as you may have noticed earlier,when Red Launcher popped up, Cyberpunk isn't native to Game Pass, and you actually need to use mouse emulation to boot the game, or you can reach for a mouse, I guess, that is an option, but that wouldn't be very console gamer of you.One reason for this could be that Xbox mode, in its current state, doesn't leverage known launch flags, and it fully opens game launchers in the background, which, kind of works against the idea of a seamless console -like experience.If you'd like to further review Lab's findings, check out the Lab's companion article linked down below.

Before you take off and do that though, it's worth discussing the fact that while Xbox game mode does not offer performance benefits, I still believe that it is a small step toward a larger goal that will be positive for gamers.Not that long ago, games were optimized for console first, often leaving PC players with buggy, unoptimized ports.That's because the low level code for consoles needed to be rewritten into something that Windows could actually understand.This created the same kind of compatibility wall that Linux gamers faced before Proton came along.And PC gamers often had to wait months, years, or even forever for devs to manually scale that wall.Microsoft alone had three fragmented software development kits that held many games hostage on one platform until the devs had the time and resources to port over their game.

The unified GDK now, at least from Microsoft, can hopefully result in something approaching console level optimization and availability on the PC.And Xbox mode on PC is a part of this same push that Microsoft is making for platform unification and treating their PC gaming customers like first -class citizens.Also, even if it doesn't have much benefit today, I do still think that there's hope for ongoing optimization.I wouldn't blame you for thinking, I mean, how in the Sam Hill is Xbox mode different from Steam to PC?Picture mode?But there is a difference, and it's in being a system versus an app level UI.

Xbox mode replaces the traditional Windows interface.All the icons, the start menu, everything, poof.On the other hand, Big Picture Mode is simply an app that is sitting on top of Windows and has no ability to shoo away background processes.So with that in mind, you would think that there would be a benefit to using it already, but hey, this is Microsoft.So we actually found that when we were playing a Steam game in particular, we ended up using more RAM in Xbox mode than in Big Picture Mode.Steam Big Picture mode just running over top of regular Windows.

This is most likely because Steam opens up anyway on Xbox mode, and Big Picture users don't need to open up the Xbox app.The other difference is that Big Picture mode is, if we're being honest, quite a bit cleaner to use.So even though we're hoping for the best for Xbox mode, and we expect it to continue to get better, you're probably gonna wanna stick with Big Picture mode for the time being.That is, unless you really value Xbox Mode's automatic detection of both Steam and non -Steam games, and you are A -OK with not being able to use more than one display while Xbox Mode is Xboxing.In conclusion, while Xbox Mode is most certainly half -baked today, Microsoft is trending towards a world where it will be even more likely that the game you want to play will be available on the platform you already own, regardless of whether it's an Xbox or a PC.So the attitude has improved, They just need to get their act together before people try this thing, realize it's not worth it, and then never try it again.

Just like people realize that it's never worth hearing this segue.To our sponsor.But they were wrong, it is.

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I will.If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one we did recently talking about what happensfinally prompted Microsoft to take action, even if that action is a little slower and a little less effective than we'd like so far.