Microsoft reduces latency in Xbox Cloud Gaming and adds mouse and keyboard support

Xbox Cloud Gaming, also known as Project xCloud, is getting support mouse and keyboard. Microsoft recommends all devs to update their products where required. Besides, the company offers new API to improve streaming latency.Xbox Cloud Gaming allows streaming your Xbox games from the cloud to TVs, PCs, and mobile devices. The Xbox device itself has had keyboard and mouse support for several years now. Now, Microsoft is working on adding that support for streaming for PC users. The change has been announced a few months ago.

According to Morgan Brown, Software Engineer on the Xbox Game Streaming team, developers can now implement support into their game, and console users using keyboard and mouse will also enjoy it. This will become available for everyone as soon as Microsoft finishes its work.

Currently, only a few games support the keyboard+mouse input method, including Minecraft, Halo: Infinite, Halo: MCC, Gears 5 and Sea of ​​Thieves.

Improvements to streaming latency

Microsoft has also revealed the new Display Details API, which is designed to reduce the delay when streaming games. The delay reduction can reportedly be up to 72 ms. The result is possible thanks to Direct Capture, which replicates the hardware features in software, eliminating VSync latency, double or triple buffering, and the scaling on TVs (if required).

Many games already support Direct Capture to improve performance through Xbox Cloud Gaming. According to Microsoft, the resulting latency with this technology can be 2-12ms, while with the classic rendering pipeline it is 8-74ms. But it is important to note that Direct Capture supports resolutions up to 1440p and does not support Dynamic Resolution and HDR.

For the majority of developers, the resolution limit won't be a big deal. Xbox Cloud Gaming already streams at 1080p for PC and web, and 720p for mobile. Microsoft plans to add support for 1440p and even 4K in the future, but didn't announce when exactly.