Hands-On Windows 145 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up. Next on Hands-On Windows, we're going to take a look at some recent advances in PC gaming, in particular, an interesting new feature called Edge Game Assist for the Game Bar in Windows 11. Podcasts you love, from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to hands on windows.

I'm paul thrott and it's been a while since we've talked about pc gaming. This is a space that's been moving really rapidly and there have been advances both on the hardware side and on the software side, and so on the hardware side, we've often talked about these Copilot Plus PCs and MPUs and things like that. But when you look at the Intel and AMD-based Copilot Plus PCs, what you see there are the very latest processors from those companies, which also have incredible integrated graphics that, among other things, can play even AAA games pretty effortlessly. Like this laptop I'm using here is just nothing special. Honestly, it's a Lenovo Yoga 9 2-in-1, but it's an Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 processor, arrow Lake, 32 gigs RAM, which is great, but really good MPU, but also really good integrated graphics from Intel. The AMD stuff is even better. So the latest Zen 5 AMD processors are rather incredible On a system with a really high res screen, all the HDR capabilities, all that stuff, full resolution, all the graphics turned on high frame rates it's insane. It's insane, it's insane. Now I'm not going to show you that. I'm going to show you Solitaire because I'm recording and this is too much to do to this poor laptop. But if it was just playing a game, like the latest Call of Duty, for example, it works wonderfully. And this is just a mainstream, prosumer, consumer type laptop, extreme pro-sumer, consumer type laptop.

So on the software side, you see improvements across various parts of Windows 11. There's Xbox as a platform. Microsoft has these plans to merge Xbox, the consoles, with Windows the PCs. That's partially rumor, but it's very clear from what they've said and what we've seen that this is where the world is going. And so we have the Xbox app here, which has become a front end to most of the gaming one might do on a PC and will soon be a front end to even more of it. It looks like they're going to evolve the Xbox console so that maybe they play PC games and that they would use this interface or some future version of it there as well. So we'll see what happens there.

One of the big advances, though over the past year, a little bit more than a year is native support for new handheld gaming PCs and these are those things that it looks like a screen with halves of a controller on either side and the Xbox app, the game bar we're going to look at later. Both support those things natively. They look and work differently when you use that kind of a hardware. So the big components here from a software perspective are again the Xbox app, the game bar I mentioned, and just kind of general compatibility with hardware like gaming peripherals. So I have a nonstandard looking purple Xbox controller, but a standard. It's an Xbox wireless controller. I have it wired with USB but it works wirelessly as well.

And when you go into search here and just type game controller, start to type game controller, you'll see this kind of old school interface. This is a control panel from the old days but one of the things it does is it allows you to make sure that all of the buttons here are working correctly so you can move things around, you can press different buttons. So if something's wrong with your controller you think there's something wrong, like this is a good way just to make sure. Maybe it's you, not the controller, maybe there's something else going on, but very basic, and it also just demonstrates that when you plug in this thing, it just works with Windows. You don't have to do anything. There's no drivers to install this, no app or whatever. You can, of course, install an app to configure the controller, and I actually do recommend that you do that. It's called Xbox Accessories and what this does is it gives you an interface for each of the accessories typically controllers, but also headsets and other hardware that you might have attached to the PC and you can configure it with different profiles and remap the keys and all that kind of stuff. But actually the big thing here is the ability to update the firmware in the controller. Now, if you have an Xbox, that happens automatically. So you plug the thing in or you just connected over Bluetooth or the Xbox frequency and it will do that for you automatically. It will prompt you. But you don't get that on Windows, and so if you're playing exclusively on Windows with an Xbox controller, definitely recommend getting this app. I'm not going to update this now, obviously, but I could and I should and I will actually after we're done here. But this is a good app to have because that's kind of a vital capability. Obviously, the Xbox app we have looked at in the past.

It has evolved in some interesting ways, but primarily this is an interface for the games that you've purchased from Microsoft, whether through the Microsoft Store or through Xbox for the PC. If you have a Game Pass subscription, it's an interface for that. I could go in here and say well, I want to play the Division 2 here and I could install it, and this would install it from the store. But I get that with my Game Pass subscription. I also have a game I have. My particular prescription is Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or Game Pass Ultimate, and that gives me cloud gaming, which is Microsoft's cloud streaming service, and this is a list of all the games that I can play over that, and these are the ones I've actually played recently that way. So the new Doom game is in here, the latest Call of Duty, et cetera, so these stream over the internet. Obviously, you need to have a pretty good connection there, et cetera, et cetera, and then I can go into my library and these are the games that I own, right? So I've somehow, over the years, apparently I've bought a lot of PC games like an idiot, but whichever they are, they're available here.

And again same thing. I could go into this game and just say, okay, I want to install it, I want to install it, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So that's fine, right? So this has been like this basically for a long time. You get notifications, you have different things going on here, but there's a couple of things you should probably know about here. Let me get rid of that. You get a menu when you click this profile icon up here in the corner Settings. A couple of things with this app that I actually don't like is, by default, the first time you launch it, it will then launch with the PC when it boots up, and when you close it, it actually doesn't close, it's still running in the background. So I actually turn those things off. I want this thing running when I want it running. I don't mind that, but I want it gone when I'm done with it. When I'm done playing the game, I'm out. I don't need Xbox running.

And then there's this offline permissions enabled feature. This is kind of a squirrely feature. You can only change it three times per year. So you want to do it on a PC that you know you're going to want to play offline on. So, for example, the latest Doom game is a single player experience or has a single player experience. I didn't, but I could configure this to be the PC that I have offline permissions enabled. That means if I'm on a plane or offline in some other way, I will be able to play that game. It doesn't have to check for the license online, and that could be useful. But you just want to be careful with this because you can only change it three times a year and then there are notifications and all the other stuff in there.

But the big one here to me is this compact mode. So when I turn this thing on, the UI changes. It gets simpler. I have the controller, so I'm going to use the controller now and now. This is designed to work with the controller. And really this is for those handheld gaming PCs right, these are things that look like Steam Deck, but we have a bunch of them and there are a bunch more coming this holiday season, and the point of this is for it to look good on a small screen, for one thing, so everything's a little bit bigger, it doesn't look horrible here but also that it's fully controller enabled. So if I go into any of these screens. If I click on something, I can always get back to where I was right, using the standard buttons, like you would. You know, you know on an Xbox right, and so that's kind of interesting. I'm going to actually turn that thing off, but that's useful and again, kind of points to the perceived future of this thing. As perhaps you know, the underlying platform for consoles as well. We'll see what happens here.

I talked about the peripheral, so the other part of this is the game bar, and so I'm again showing the lamest possible game, but it's the one that comes with Windows and it's not going to stress the system too much. Typically, I would be playing a slightly more violent game this but Solitaire is built in. It's fine. So I could type Windows key plus G to bring up this interface. Actually, I need to make sure it's selected first so it comes up in the right place, so you can see the overlays on top of this game. Or I could use the controller and you hit the white xbox button and same thing. So a couple of things to this.

This also supports a compact mode, so if I put it into, if I could figure out how to do that, uh, where is that interface? Um, there is a way to. There's an interface here somewhere, but this allows you to use the controller, right? Um, that little toggle I use is actually one of two ways to do that, but um, I'll just put it back in the normal mode for the mouse. I think it's must be. Which one is it it's bugging me? I can't find it. I'm sorry, I don't usually use this in compact mode, but, um, you get this selection of widgets right.

Most of what you see here are the default widgets, but there's also a new feature which is really cool. I typically put this kind of. I put this on so I can see the frame rate. That's something. When I review laptops, I want to see how well they're performing. I will actually turn that off because it stays on all the time otherwise, but we've got this thing here. So this just debuted.

As I record this, this feature has finally come out. It's out of preview. You'll just get it automatically. If you have the latest version of Edge, this will just appear. There's nothing to configure, it just shows up, and what this is is a mini version of the Edge web browser. It doesn't have to be mini. You can make it bigger as well. And if you pin this, like I had pinned that performance widget before, and go back to the game, it stays open and the idea here is that it has.

It may have it doesn't always, but it doesn't for solitaire. I actually loaded this myself earlier, but, um, what this allows you to do is interact with the game while you're playing the game, without all tabbing to a browser, which a lot of us do. So if you're playing a single player game, you need help with a particular level. You might go and Google or Bing and say I'm playing this game, here's the level I need to walk through, or something like that. You can do that. You can do that here. I don't know what kind of help I could get for Solitaire exactly, but I can definitely do that here if I want to. But if it detects the game, it actually has a mode where it can use AI to examine the game that you're playing and figure out where you are in the game or what's happening in the game, and then it will give you context sensitive help.

So the goal here is that this thing will eventually just be interacting with you as you play a game. You don't even have to bring this thing up. It will just be there running in the background. You can talk to it. It will talk to you and while you're playing the game you can get help or just express frustration or whatever it is you might want to do. But in this case, if the, if I was running, say, the latest uh, call of duty, I believe, the latest doom probably.

I think a lot of the, the Microsoft slash Activision games feature this. It would um, detect what you were doing and then provide proactively provide help. You know, it looks like you're having trouble with the sniper in the window, like here's something you could try, which would probably involve a rocket launcher or whatever. So it's kind of interesting. It's kind of a lot of kind of hardcore gamer types might have mocked this feature when it was first announced, but honestly, this is incredibly helpful and if you've ever anyone who's played video games is Googled or use search or whatever to try to find help, and so to me this is actually a very welcome addition. So I think this is really cool.

Anyhow, it's available now. So if you have windows 11 update to the latest version of edge and, uh, you'll just get it. You can enable it, you can pin it If you want, you can use it as you go. You'll just get it. You can enable it, you can pin it. If you want, you can use it as you go. It's good stuff and, yeah, solitaire, sorry about that. Someday I'll have a powerful computer and I can do two things at one time, but that day is not today. So hopefully you found this interesting and useful. We have a new episode of hands on windows every Thursday, which you can find at twittv slash how. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. If you're not a member of Club Twit, get access to all the content no ads, good karma, all the right reasons. You can learn more about that at twittv slash, club Twit. Thanks, I'll see you next week.