Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming to support keyboard and mouse

Microsoft has announced a new update of its xCloud that will include mouse and keyboard support and important latency improvements. Thus, Xbox fans can get ready to enjoy a better gaming experience with the help of this tech giant. In this entry, we explore these changes and analyse their advantages.

What is Xbox Cloud Gaming?

Xbox Cloud Gaming or simply xCloud is another one of Microsoft’s popular products. This time, they introduced great value into the gaming world, improving gaming experiences and making them more accessible.

xCloud is available through the Xbox premium subscription and it lets you play on any device. This means that you don’t need a console game or a bulky gamer computer anymore: now your smart TV or tablet can serve as vehicles for this type of fun. When it launched, xCloud was based on Android, but now is available for both iOS and PC through Microsoft.

Another big plus is that you don’t need to download the games anymore, instead, you can play directly on the server. This saves you plenty of disk space.

Yet, cloud gaming is not without drawbacks. Some users still prefer the traditional consoles over the new cloud-based technology. If you want to know more about this, here are the pros and cons of console and cloud gaming.

What can you play on xCloud?

The regular Xbox game pass costs 10USD a month and grants you access to 200 games. You can play on any of the Microsoft platforms including Xbox One, Xbox Series S, and Xbox series X. The Ultimate pass, however, costs only 5 USD more (15 USD) and broadens your opportunities considerably by being able to play on PC, consoles, and on the cloud itself. Some of the most popular games available on xCloud are the following:

• Assassin’s creed origins
• Citizen sleeper
• Umurangi generation
• Vampire survivors
• Her story
• Tunic
• Halo
• Slay the spire
• Carrion
• Tetris effect
• Minecraft
• Hades
• Stardew valley
• Age of empires 4
• Nobody saves the world

New Xbox Cloud Gaming features

Microsoft announced the addition of keyboard and mouse support to the xCloud earlier this year. Lately, they have been encouraging users to get ready for this update. So, what is this update about?

Morgan Brown, a software engineer for Windows stated that Xbox has been supporting mice and keyboards for years, and now it’s time for the PCs. According to him, PC users streaming games from the Microsoft Cloud will be able to enjoy these features too. Moreover, this is confirmed by the fact that Microsoft has been asking developers to focus on developing these characteristics, which means they can be implemented quite soon.

The reality is that very few games include keyboard and mouse features by default. Some of these are Minecraft, Halo Infinite, Fortnite, and Sea of Thieves. This is why the new update becomes interesting, especially before the software giant expands the gaming library a few months from now.

Improved latency

Latency is an important word in gaming. This is the unit that measures the time information takes to travel from the source to its destination. This means that the higher the latency, the slower your response will be. For example, in an extreme case, your avatar won’t respond when you order a move. High latency can seriously affect your playing, and this is why software companies struggle to reduce it.

Together with the keyboard and mouse support, Microsoft is intending to improve latency by encouraging its developers to do so. They have been working on a new Display Details API that works most interestingly. It uses a Direct Capture which reproduces hardware features in the software. Thus, double, and triple buffering will not be a problem anymore and the VSync wait time is eliminated. The waiting time due to scaling (needed for TV devices) is also eradicated. With this strategy, engineers expect to save up to 72ms.

Many games already support Direct Capture showing a latency drop down to 2-12ms. If we compare it with the traditional displays (8-74ms), the numbers are quite encouraging. However, the feature still has limitations because it supports a maximum resolution of 1440p. HDR and dynamic resolutions are also not supported yet.

While the resolution is not an issue for now (xCloud can scale down to 1080p on PCs), Microsoft intends to support higher ones in the future, but we don’t have a release date just yet. According to Brown, they expect to implement this after testing under different conditions and on various devices.

Latency improvements are key in the gaming industry as users are always looking for higher performance. For example, Nvidia launched a new tier 3080 GeForce in 2021 with significant latency reductions. They achieved this by building an Adaptive-Sync technology that allows the game to adapt to a synchronic monitor. The results also throw buffering reduction on the server’s side between the CPU and the GPU making a remarkable difference with options offered by xCloud or Google Stadia.

Final thoughts on the xCloud updates

Undoubtedly, this new stage will be exciting for gamers. The possibility to leverage the mouse and the keyboard when playing on your PC is tempting, not to mention the promise of latency reduction.

While other companies are also stepping strong in the gaming industry, Microsoft seems to be working towards providing a superb gaming experience. We’ll just have to wait and see what the future, or Microsoft, in this case, brings.