For me, Xbox Cloud Gaming has always been a promising look at where Microsoft is headed, even if it hasn’t quite gotten there yet. Though the company has since moved on to selling more powerful home consoles, Cloud Gaming — up until this point — has used the tech of the Xbox One S, which has really held it back. Microsoft provided some good news at E3 when it announced it would soon complete upgrades to Cloud Gaming’s infrastructure, swapping out those Xbox One S server blades for machines based on the Series X instead. Now, according to some who’ve used Xbox Cloud Gaming today (and confirmed by me), Microsoft may have started putting some of those servers online.
As IGN reports, users are starting to discover Xbox Series X features popping up in some titles featured in the Cloud Gaming library. Twitter user Klobrille, for instance, noticed that Rainbow Six Siege‘s 120 FPS options were present while streaming from the cloud, which definitely points to Microsoft running the Xbox Series X version of the game.
I loaded in myself and was able to locate a number of titles currently hitting 60 FPS on Xbox Cloud Gaming for the first time, including Destiny 2, The Elder Scrolls Online, and Sea of Thieves. Not every title has been blessed with those much smoother frame rates, however; when I jumped into Forza Horizon 4, it was very much running at 30 FPS still, and looked a whole lot like an Xbox One S game (aka much worse). It seems this rollout is not hitting every possible Series X game at the moment, nor did it add FPS Boost to any of the supported Xbox One games I tried.
In playing on games that are using the newer Xbox Series X blades, I experienced a very noticeable drop in latency, and what felt like much faster load times. As I trotted through the Tower in Destiny 2, I could finally envision myself actually using this Cloud feature to play games on the go.
Of course, the real world will likely step in at some point and slap me with a dose of reality. I’m on a wired gigabit internet connection at home. My phone is not going to do that, and it’s not guaranteed I’ll even get a good wifi connection anywhere else I go. But I’m catching a glimpse of the future right now — one where games go anywhere and downloads aren’t a thing — and it looks pretty awesome.
More news on Xbox Cloud Gaming as it comes in.
