The Xbox App for Windows 10 was touted as a major feature before launch, but you barely hear about it after. I will occasionally get a notification that I can record game footage, or a little pop-up after pressing the center button of my 360 controller. Other than that, I barely notice that it exists. A lot of the functionality is useful to manage their Xbox One or Xbox Live Gamertag (do they even call it that anymore?) but PC gamers barely have a reason to open it. Granted, I expect Microsoft hopes that will change after enough Xbox-aware games for Windows 10 hit market. It's early days.
Some currently use it though, and it has just received an update for them. Version 9.9.16003.00000 has added four new features, two of which implement automatic updates for friends and their activity feeds. The button to refresh is still present, which is always nice in case something goes wrong, but it shouldn't need to be pressed as the app should be pulling notifications from Microsoft's servers on its own.
The other two features are more interesting.
The Xbox App now supports “Console text entry”. This feature allows Xbox One users to type into the console's search boxes “and more” using Windows 10 devices, and, more importantly, their keyboards or keypads. A chat pad is being launched for the console soon, which plugs into the controller to give it a QWERTY keyboard, but supporting laptops is definitely nice.
The last feature is “Game progress comparison”. In the Achievements panel, you are able to click on the “compare” button to line up your achievement history next to your friends. As it turns out, Ryan has a higher score than me in Halo 3. That just won't do.
Microsoft has also announced that they will be providing a Beta app in the future, which will arrive later this month. You can pick it up from the Windows Store when it becomes available, if you want.
I really hope Win10 is
I really hope Win10 is Microsoft’s downfall, they can’t stop doing terrible, stupid things since Vista.
Who wants an OS made for the government to spy on you with?
Steam OS(RTM) is coming, and
Steam OS(RTM) is coming, and without all the Spyware As An OS(SAAOS) that comes from Redmond. Steam OS will be optimized for games with the minimum of only the necessary OS services, and not the unnecessary such as M$’s windows 10 that is so full of the TIFKAM tiles “Universal” crApps runtime, and other CPU cycles stealing services, spyware, ad pushing, and WiFi bandwidth sharing with everybody and their dog.
Steam OS will have only what is necessary for the games to run, and as with any Debian based distro the option of adding any other functionality if the user wants more non gaming OS functionality. I’d rather have the OS as streamlined for gaming as possible like Steam OS and have Linux Mint for a productivity OS.
Maybe some future Steam OS could come with a Linux based type one hypervisor arrangement OPTION, and I could run Steam OS and Linux Mint/other, Windows 7(spyware back-porting and telemetry blocked), in their own VM environments. Steam OS will be tuned for gaming, with plenty of options geared towards gaming, without all the in your business and spying of windows 10!
I like this idea a lot and
I like this idea a lot and have been wanting to play with doing it after seeing https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Multiheaded-NVIDIA-Gaming-using-Ubuntu-14-04-KVM-585/
I want an AMD GPU for the ACE
I want an AMD GPU for the ACE units, and more of the gaming and graphics workloads running on the AEC units. I want Steam OS for both Gaming and Graphics rendering workloads, as Steam OS will be much less Bloatware bound than any M$ OS is.
Vulkan will allow for much more Asynchronous Compute Engines(ACE) utilization of processing resources on AMD’s GCN line of GPUs. Latency between CPU and GPU is a big issue for any system with a Discrete GPU as the communication channel between CPU and GPU is over PCIe. The VR gaming developers are eyeballing AMD’s GPU hardware Asynchronous compute as a way to run more of a games code directly on the GPU, in addition to the graphics workloads, so GPU hardware Asynchronous compute is coming into its own with Vulkan and the other newer graphics APIs and VR gaming as a way to reduce the Latency involved when a CPU has to communicate with the GPU.
AMDs ACEs have a lot of the features that have more in common with a CPU’s! AMDs ACE units have the ability to context switch GPU processing threads, and handle GPU processing thread switching SMT style to keep the GPUs ACE units and their processing threads running at as close to 100% GPU hardware usage as possible without letting GPU processing resources remain idle for lack of full hardware Asynchronous processing abilities. Any GPU processing threads that run into data dependencies, or stall, and have to wait for other data to be available can have their processing suspended until the data becomes available, and the stalled GPU thread can be immediately and quickly parked and another thread context switched in and worked on with little or no GPU resources remaining idle with no work while a data/other dependency comes up for a running thread.
Nvidia is going to have to stop reducing its GPU hardware processing resources, and go with more fine grained power gating of its GPU hardware resources when they not needed, Nvidia is also going to have to go with Full Hardware Asynchronous compute, and not partial hardware Asynchronous compute is the future. AMD’s Arctic Islands will have even more Full Hardware Asynchronous compute ability and the VR gaming industry will be looking at doing more gaming workloads on the GPUs massive amounts of FP/INT/other units to reduce latency to a minimum for VR gaming. AMD has put a lot of work into Full Hardware Asynchronous compute, and not just for the gaming industry, AMD is going full on interposer based HPC/Workstation APUs for the server, workstation, and exascale supercomputing market systems, and the US government is issuing even more research grants for its exascale initiative. Gaming, especially VR gaming, is going to want APUs on an Interposer for their systems, because CPUs and GPUs can be wired up more directly on an Interposer with 10s of thousands of individual traces connecting CPU to GPU in parallel to each other, and to HBM.
Most of the gaming engine code will move to being done on the GPU, and not the CPU to reduce latency to a minimum for Discrete systems, until the full systems on an interposer take over and CPUs can be wired up more directly to the GPUs, and even then the GPU will still have more raw computing resources to run most of the gaming code, and graphics.
dream your little dreams
dream your little dreams
How many hours in a day do
How many hours in a day do you spend writing nonsense?
gov spying? really? gota
gov spying? really? gota screw loose upstairs?
don’t use it, shut up, go away.