Windows 10 Announcements – Gaming Summary

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox and Microsoft Studios announced a few gaming features during Microsoft’s Windows 10 stream today. All Win10 devices (PC, tablet, smartphone) will include the Xbox App, providing the following features:

• My Games, Friends, Messages, Achievements and Activity Feed for your games and friends lists.
• Invite people to parties or watch their GameDVR clips from your Windows 10 device
• Ability to capture the last 30 seconds of your game and edit it for sharing through GameDVR. You can use buttons to capture!
• Cross-platform multiplayer between Xbox One and PC games, demonstrated with Fable Legends. So presumably, that’s coming to Windows.
• Ability to stream Xbox One games to your Win10 PC or tablet.

For developers, various unspecified Windows 10 features will be coming to Xbox One, making it easier to develop software to run on both PCs and the Xbox One.

Windows 10 will also ship with DirectX 12. On CPU-intensive games, this should increase their performance by up to 50% over DirectX 11 using the same hardware.

DirectX 12 has already been adopted by Unity for their engine, and Epic Games for Unreal Engine 4.

For the first year after release, people who own Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 for free.

Early builds of Windows 10 will be going out to Microsoft’s “insiders” next week, with phone equivalents following in February. No specific date on when the full version will be available to consumers.