Xbox Cloud Gaming will add Direct Capture features to reduce the latency
Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming is currently available on many platforms, whether it’s iOS or Android phones, TVs, Xbox consoles, and even Samsung TVs, as long as players are in a supported region. And as more and more players join, Microsoft is also preparing to make some upgrades to this service. At present, the servers of Xbox Cloud Gaming have been upgraded to the same hardware specifications as the Xbox Series X, and in the near future, Microsoft will also introduce new features to improve latency and will add mouse and keyboard controls to Xbox Cloud Gaming.
In a recent video, Microsoft engineer Morgan Brown confirmed that mouse and keyboard support will be added to Xbox Cloud Gaming, thereby encouraging more game developers to add mouse and keyboard input to their Xbox versions of games. The Xbox console itself already supports keyboard and mouse input, but whether the game can be used depends on whether the developer has incorporated support into the game.
In the current Xbox version of the game, there are only about 100 games that support keyboard and mouse input, which is more than before, but it is still very small compared to other cloud game services such as NVIDIA’s GeForce Now. The addition of keyboard and mouse support to Xbox Cloud Gaming is expected to allow more developers to add corresponding support to the game.
However, everyone knows that the input support of the cloud game is not the biggest technical problem at present, but the latency is. In order to reduce the latency of Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft is currently developing a technology called “Direct Capture”, which can reduce the latency from 74ms to 12ms at most. If it can be done, the lag of the player in the operation should be greatly improved.
However, after applying “Direct Capture”, the resolution of the game will also be reduced from the highest 4K to 2K. But considering that Xbox Cloud Gaming currently only supports streaming resolutions up to 1080P, this problem should not have much impact.
When these new features will meet with you is still unknown, but they should be expected to be available within the year.
