And because Xbox Cloud Gaming requires a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, anyone with a cheaper PC Game Pass subscription will miss out anyway.Ĭonversely, streaming does help cope with a weakness of the hardware: its small internal storage capacities.
This is, after all, a portable handheld, and streaming features are useless when you’re carrying it outside of dependable Wi-Fi range.
It's also hard to shift the thought that Microsoft’s efforts might be better spent working with Valve on a way to get Game Pass games installable and playable on the Steam Deck locally. Worse, the entire app can sometimes just fail to launch any games when commanded this can be soft-fixed by either restarting the Steam Deck or clearing the Edge browser’s cache, but it needs a more permanent patching ASAP. Back 4 Blood ran well with the exception of all its sound effects playing out of sync, the last thing you’d want in a frenetic FPS punctuated by gunshots. Aside from the occasional little oddity, like the login screen’s Cancel button always being in German (?), some games get hit by far graver problems. There’s a few seconds of delay when resuming, to re-establish an internet connection, but that’s it.Īgain, though, there’s room for improvement. None of these games suffered any input lag issues or dropped connections in the time I spent streaming them, and Xbox Cloud Gaming plays fairly nicely with SteamOS’ quick suspend and resume feature. These include big hitters like Microsoft Flight Simulator, which just about manages 30fps here, and Halo Infinite, which aims for 60fps and largely stays there. The big advantage to streaming is that it essentially unlocks games that have been classed as “Unsupported” by Valve’s compatibility review programme: games that you simply wouldn’t be able to play in full, without swapping the entire OS to Windows 10.
The newly-launched Tunic runs at a slick 60fps, and while Forza Horizon 5 is limited to 30fps, it actually looks decent with a dab of motion blur. Games aren’t quite as sharp as they’d be when running natively but I never had any problems reading small text. And in fairness, when it works, Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck works well. Happily, Microsoft’s senior program manager Ben Mathwig has already tweeted that the installation process will get much simpler in time.
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