Microsoft is testing 1080p xCloud streams for cloud gaming Xbox Game Pass

Project xCloud is the code name for Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Cloud Gaming Streaming Service ™, which brings Xbox Live Gold, Xbox Game Pass for console, and Xbox Game Pass for PC into one much cheaper subscription model. On top of that, you also have access to cloud gaming, which allows you to stream a range of Xbox console games to an Android device.

Soon Microsoft is set to expand Xbox Game Pass cloud streaming to the web, bypassing silly Apple iOS store rules and bringing xCloud to PCs for the first time. However, what about some of the current limitations of xCloud?

Reports suggest that Microsoft is planning to upgrade the Xbox cloud streaming servers from the Xbox One architecture to the Xbox Series X architecture during this year, and we may have started to see some of the fruits of that labor. . Trusted sources recently sent us this screenshot of Xbox Streaming Testing Tools for Developers, which comes with a developer overlay for benchmarking network connectivity, as well as resolution.

Until now, Hellblade and other Xbox cloud games have been limited to a maximum of 720p video streams. While it does help on bandwidth and responsiveness, 720p looks pretty blurry. If you live near a Microsoft data center and have display resolution pushing QHD or higher (often the case with high-end mobile devices), you don’t quite experience gaming as expected.

It appears Microsoft is already testing 1080p streams for xCloud, which would bring it in line with the basic “free” tier of Google Stadia and other similar streaming services. The latest update to the streaming test app also supports direct console streaming, which also streams well at 1080p.

Above you can see how the resolution quality compared to the 1080p photo sent to us from a trusted source. Our xCloud test app crushes the resolution because I’m too far away from a Microsoft datacenter that supports this 1080p test, presumably.

Either way, upgrading xCloud’s streaming capacity, paired with Xbox Series X hardware SSDs, should allow Xbox Game Pass cloud streaming to increase in quality across the board. It won’t take up to a minute to get a server running for you, as it currently does, and it also won’t take a few minutes to load into the game.

Recently, Google Stadia announced that it was ending its local content efforts and looking to reduce its efforts on Stadia. Reports have said that Google is paying tens of millions of publishers just to support the platform, which, understandably, doesn’t seem too sustainable. Microsoft’s great advantage with xCloud is that they are already have all content from Xbox Game Pass cloud streaming is literally built on the Xbox console platform. As Xbox Game Pass rolls out hardware upgrades throughout 2021 and beyond, the gap between Microsoft and its competition will widen even further.

You can grab the Xbox Game Pass streaming by using Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and a device like one of the devices from our best xCloud tablet compilation, or by using one of the phone attachments from our best xCloud mobile clip compilation .

Don’t forget to also check out our previous hands-on xCloud for PC in the video below.