Windows 10 Gaming Announcements Bridge Win10 PCs and XBox One

Microsoft’s Windows 10 coverage included a generous heap of announcements about their gaming plans for the platform. The core of the XBox experience is now a cross-platform app. This XBox app will be available for Windows 10 PCs and Tablets. It brings My Games, Messages, Friends, Activity Feed, cross-platform gameplay & voice and text chat to all of your larger Windows 10 devices. Windows game players will start gaining XBox achievements for game play.

The XBox app also includes a feature called Game DVR that allows you to capture clips of gameplay on any Windows 10 gaming device. The DVR functionality automatically buffers the last 30 seconds of play so you can capture unexpected events after the fact. You can like, comment on, share, etc., clips that you and others create. This works for all games, even ones from Steam that predate Windows 10 itself.

DirectX 12, with an emphasis on power consumption, runs games at half the power consumption as on DX11 for the same scene complexity. CPU-bound games see up to a 50% performance improvement. Unreal Engine 4 and Unity3D have both adopted DirectX 12.

Windows 10 will enable players to stream Xbox One games to Windows 10 PCs and tablets. The player pairs the tablet or computer to the console and can the play all of their console games, even platform exclusive ones, using a controller through the PC. The game executes on the console, so even Windows 10 devices that don’t have the power to handle the game will play them just fine.

Today’s announcement brings some genuinely exciting news for XBox fans in particular because this greatly opens up the playing field for XBox titles. Microsoft is showing off an array of features that competing platforms like the PlayStation 4 just can’t touch. As a PC gamer myself, it’s good to see Microsoft’s commitment to gaming on the Windows platform in all of its incarnations.