At the latest Xfest 2022 event for game developers, Microsoft announced support for keyboards and mice on the Xbox Cloud Gaming service is coming soon. Another pleasant bonus from the forthcoming is the reduction of lag time during gameplay.
Morgan Brown, one of the representatives of the Redmond team, made it clear as part of a dialogue with the press at Xfest 2022 that Xbox consoles have long been equipped with keyboard and mouse support, but in the case of the cloud versions of games the implementation of such basic things appears only now. The innovation is being prepared not only for consoles, but also, of course, for PC. But in this matter, there are still difficulties in terms of ensuring the work with the keyboard and mouse in all cloud versions of games.
At the moment, the classic controller bundle is supported by cloud-based Minecraft, Halo Infinite, Fortnite and Sea of Thieves. As the Xbox Cloud Gaming library grows, the list of supported projects will also expand.
Another point is the appearance of the Direct Capture feature for the Display Details API. It allows you to reduce the signal delay to 2-12 ms, compared to 8-74 ms at the moment.
The new version of the API has some limitations — at a minimum, we’re only talking 1440p resolution at most right now, not quite full support for dynamic resolution and HDR technology. In Redmond’s opinion, these limitations shouldn’t have a significant impact on the developers, because the “ceiling” resolution for cloud versions of games is 720p on mobile devices and 1080p on PC and consoles.
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