Microsoft has made a big change for Xbox owners who might want to play console games directly on their PC, with the ability to Remote Play having just been introduced with a fresh update.
This means that those running the Xbox App on Windows 10 can now stream games from their console and enjoy them on their PC and monitor setup. That could be of obvious benefit to those with lower-powered Windows 10 machines which may not be able to run games at decent frame rates.
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You’ll need to be signed up for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to use this new Remote Play facility (with the feature rolling out to subscribers across 22 countries, Microsoft notes). It works with the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles, as well as previous Xbox One models.
You don’t even need to be at home to benefit from streaming, so if you’ve got a laptop on the move, say, it’s still possible to stream from the cloud using the Xbox App (for Xbox Game Pass titles, anyway).
Microsoft observes: “This marks the first time we’ve enabled Xbox Remote Play on PC for Xbox Series X|S owners. We’ve also made additional upgrades from previous iterations of Remote Play, such as general stability updates, allowing for games to stream at 1080p up to 60fps, and adding the ability to play select Xbox 360 and Xbox Original games, which has been one of the most highly-requested features.”
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This could have all kinds of benefits, of course, in being able to play Xbox games on lesser PC hardware as mentioned, streaming them and relying on the performance grunt of the console instead – and also in terms of PCs with small drives and perhaps little room to install any given game (remember, you’re streaming the title, so there’s no need to install anything on your computer’s drive).
Or as Microsoft highlights in its announcement post, the added flexibility here is pretty cool, so if you can’t play on the TV in the living room because someone’s watching it, for example, you can at least stream a game to your PC elsewhere in the house.
Obviously it’s also great to see that Remote Play has been improved during testing, with better stability for game streaming, and the ability to run at up to 60 frames per second – the magic number for smooth gameplay – is a definite step forward here.
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Via Windows Central
