Microsoft Windows 11 will take a leaf from the new Xbox Series X and Series S consoles to provide what it calls ‘the best PC gaming experience’ yet.
During the Windows 11 keynote, Microsoft confirmed the Auto HDR tech that debuted on the next-gen consoles, will be available on the Windows 11 PCs.
As the name would suggest, this will automatically bring high dynamic range elements to games that have been made with the DirectX 11 (and higher) development platform.
Previously these games would have only rendered in SDR and the boost displayed during the event was telling. “HDR allows a supported game to render a much wider range of brightness values and colors, giving an extra sense of richness and depth to the image,” Microsoft says in a Windows 11 blog post.
Elsewhere, Microsoft is promising Windows 11 will deliver some impressive speed boosts for Windows 11 PCs packing high performance NVMe SSD. Microsoft says this will “quickly load assets to the graphics card without bogging down the CPU.”
The pitch here is shorter wait times and more detail rendered at faster speeds. You’ll need a DirectStorage Optimised Windows 11 PC in order to experience this feature to the fullest.
Microsoft was, of course, keen to point out the cast library of games available through Xbox Game Pass for PC. There’s more than 100 PC games available as part of the subscription and the Xbox app will now be built into Windows 11.
Subscribers will still be able to access an impressive library of Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda titles on the day they come out, while EA Play is also bundled in. Xbox Cloud Gaming will also be available via a web browser, meaning any PC can access the very latest games regardless of the hardware.
Cloud gaming is also coming directly to the Xbox app for PC, which will be a neat all-in-one solution for PC gamers and their Xbox-owning counterparts.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.