GRcade

Ad7 wrote:Played a vr game called compound yesterday. It's really a demo made by one guy, but I got a good hour out of it, very immersive despite the retro visuals. Highly recommend giving it a go. Here's me finishing it for the first time:



https://notdead.itch.io/compound

Also some messing about in the lab hub area:

Xbox and Windows Insiders See Beam Streaming, Windows 10 Game Mode and More from the Windows 10 Creators Update This Week

It’s a big update week for Xbox One and PC gamers who are part of the Xbox and Windows Insider Programs. Starting later this week, these gamers will see and experience new features from the Windows 10 Creators Update on PC, with additional features expected to hit console in the coming days. Earlier this week, select Insider members saw new features such as the updated Home, Guide, and refreshed multitasking for Xbox One. This week’s update includes some big new additions for PC gamers, with a few more features releasing for Xbox One owners soon. These new features are releasing to a subset of Insiders starting later this week, with more Xbox and Windows Insider Program members receiving these in the coming weeks.

Here’s a look at the new features reaching select Xbox and Windows Insiders starting later this week:





Built-in Beam streaming (Xbox One, Windows 10 PC): Beam is the easiest and quickest way to stream gameplay, and it’s part of Insider builds starting later this week on your Windows 10 PC, with Xbox One functionality releasing to preview soon. For the creators out there, we wanted to make it easier for you to start your live game streams without any delays so you can quickly connect and engage with your viewers no matter where they are. On Beam, streams have under one second of delay; using our brand new streaming protocol dubbed “FTL”, you can interact with livestreams as if you were in the same room as the caster. What’s more, any stream can incorporate simple interactive features such as sound boards. Starting later this week on Windows 10 PCs, you can start Beam broadcasts by pulling up the Game bar — Windows key + G. And coming soon on Xbox One, you can also begin streaming directly from inside the Guide. The ability to manage your Beam broadcasts and interact with fellow gamers on chat will appear as overlays.



Game Mode (Windows 10 PC): Last year, we set out to make Windows 10 the best Windows ever for gaming. With Game Mode, it’s our goal to now take things a step further to make the gaming experience on Windows even better. Our vision is that Game Mode optimizes your Windows 10 PC for an improvement in overall game performance. This week’s Windows Insider build represents the first step on our journey with Game Mode. To enable Game Mode for your Win32 or UWP game, pull up the Game bar (Windows key + G) and click on the Settings button. There you’ll be able to opt the running game into using Game Mode. We’ll have additional details about Game Mode to share throughout Insider testing, so stay tuned.



Gaming section in System Settings (Windows 10 PC): Later this week, inside the main Windows System Settings, a new section is being added: Gaming, identified with the Xbox logo. Starting later this week, you’ll find settings for Game bar, GameDVR and broadcasting in this new Gaming area, with Game Mode coming in a future update. We’re also beginning to consolidate some system and user settings for gaming in this unified location, where PC users are accustomed to accessing their settings. We’ll continue to develop and deploy Gaming settings over time, as we continue to gather gamer feedback.

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That’s all for this week, but like we’ve said over the past few weeks, there’s plenty more to come for gamers on both Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. There’s more with Beam, Arena, and new social features, just to name a few. We look forward to your feedback as you test out these new features and we’ll keep you posted as more are readied for Insider releases.

The goal behind Game Mode is consistency, rather than flat performance boosts (although it will bring some of that too). Game Mode will prevent system tasks from stealing resources from your games, making frame rates and performance generally more consistent. You should see fewer dropped frames as a result of Game Mode, specifically during scenes and situations that are more intensive on your system's hardware. Game Mode will also limit CPU thread contention between your games and existing system processes, helping to speed things up even further. The concepts behind Game Mode are already available on Xbox One, which gives games priority access to system resources.

Enabling Game Mode will be as simple as flipping a switch via the Xbox Game Bar, found on Windows 10 by pressing the Windows key and G. Windows 10 will remember which games have Game Mode enabled until you turn it off.

Microsoft told me that while Win32 PC games (typical of Steam) will see some benefits from Game Mode, it will be UWP games (typical of the Windows 10 Store) that see the biggest improvements. This is because the UWP environment is a little more standardized than Win32, and Microsoft can more easily optimize the feature as a result. Microsoft is working with their hardware partners, including Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, to make sure Game Mode is as good as it can be, optimizing for the most popular hardware configurations available

Windows 10 Game Mode: 6 of your burning questions answered

How exactly will Game Mode improve my PC games?

Some of you – OK, maybe just us – may have assumed that Game Mode would simply deactivate extraneous background processes to free up precious system resources for said game to use, but that’s not the case at all.

“One thing we wanted to make sure with Game Mode that we didn’t do is, one of our core tenets is ‘do no harm,’ and we wanted to be very thoughtful about just turning things off willy nilly, Gammill says.

So, if Game Mode isn’t removing anything from the equation, how does it work? Game Mode works by dedicating your graphics card (GPU) and processor (CPU) resources differently so that games get the lion’s share once Game Mode is enabled.

“When you have a game running in the foreground, we basically will give the game more affordances to the GPU resources than the background tasks,” Gammill says. “Windows kind of has this default split between foreground and background, [and] we can tweak those numbers.”

“We know you’re in a game, we know you’re taxing the GPU, [so] if you’re in the foreground will actually give more of those GPU slices than you would normally get with Game Mode turned off.”

Basically, Game Mode allows Windows to dedicate more of your GPU resources to the game you’re playing than it would without this mode enabled. On the CPU side, the philosophy is the same, but the allocation of resources is handled a little bit differently.

“We’re essentially affinitizing [or separating] the CPU cores,” Gammill reveals. “If you take an eight-core machine and you’re running a game on it, typically the game is spread across those eight cores along with the system processes that are running.”

“When you’re playing a game and you run into some of those hiccups, it’s often not because of the game, but because of something going on the background just kicked up and stole some of the CPU resources. So, what we do is we affinitize a lot of CPU cores, so that the game will get 80% of the cores [for example], and they will get 100% of that 80% of all the cores. And, the system will get the remaining 20% of the cores, but at 100% of their capacity.”

How drastic of a performance boost should I expect?

This is an understandably difficult question for Microsoft to answer, as there are simply too many variables in the equation.

“It’s really too early to tell,” Gammill admits, “[as] we’re just going through all of our testing and the variability here is pretty dramatic, depending on the machine, what other software is on the machine and, of course, which game it is.”

How do I enable Game Mode?

Activating Game Mode is super simple, actually. You just press the Windows key and the G key at once to access the Game Bar like normal, but now the menu lists a check box that should read “Enable Game Mode for this game,” and “boom you’re off to the races,” as Gammill puts it.

How many PC games will support Game Mode?

Here’s a bit of wonderful news: both Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Win32 games will support Game Mode. Microsoft keeps an internal list of games for this feature and others related to gaming, which we’re told is updated more frequently than Windows itself.

There’s no word on exactly how many games, either Win32 or UWP, will support the feature, but we’re getting the impression that the number is enormous. On a select, growing numbers of these games – regardless of whether they’re UWP or Win32 – will see the feature automatically enabled. Of course, disabling Game Mode on a game is as easy as enabling it.

“If it runs on Windows 10, Game Mode will support it,” Gammill tell us, but with a small caveat.

“Essentially, with Win32, we know where the game starts, at the .EXE, [but] we really don’t know where the game ends. It could call into system services that we’re not aware of. With UWP, we understand the full bounds the of game. So, there are some cases we think that UWP-based games get slightly more benefit from Game Mode than Win32 games, but no question that both will benefit.”

Will Game Mode support my CPU and GPU?

Emphatically, yes. Game Mode will support Nvidia and AMD graphics cards as well as AMD and Intel processors.

When can I get this Game Mode already?

The latest word from Microsoft is January 26, and it will only come then as part of the next Windows Insider Program build. If you’re not in on Microsoft’s Windows Insider Program, which you can check out here, Game Mode will come with the big Windows 10 Creators Update later this spring.

We’re told that Game Mode is a culmination of Microsoft’s learnings in releasing several Xbox game consoles since the early aughts, so there’s clearly the power of pedigree behind this update, making the wait seem even longer.

“In the operating system of all those devices, we made certain affordances for games and learned a lot of lessons,” Gammill says. “Essentially, we took best practices and concepts that we learned across all of those consoles and now we’re bringing them to Windows, and you see in the incarnation of Game Mode itself.”