In a new blog post, Microsoft says its, “commitment is to make Windows the best place to game—no matter where you play.” The company lays out a detailed checklist of all the measures it has taken to make gaming better on the PC in 2025 and name checks a few ideas for the future. It’s a substantial roll call. But Windows remains under threat, most obviously from Valve’s Steam OS, but also arguably from its own crumminess.
Microsoft groups the gaming enhancements it delivered in 2025 into three broad groups: handheld innovation, Windows on Arm, and DirectX. Kicking off with handheld gaming, Microsoft says key improvements include the full screen experience (FSE) that debuted on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally.
That’s designed to enable a more consistent, “console-like” experience while also minimising background tasks for better frame rates. Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) also debuted on the Xbox Ally. ASD delivers precompiled shaders at install time, eliminating most of the wait time and stuttering when you launch a game for the first time.
Microsoft claims the “numbers speak for themselves” when it comes to ASD. “In Avowed, first-run load time dropped by over 80% and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 dropped by over 95%,” Microsoft says. “Dozens” of games are now said to support ASD.
Moving over to running games on Arm-based PCs, the three biggies are local gameplay through the Xbox app, expanded Prism emulation, and anti-cheat support.
Behold Microsoft’s vision of the future of gaming. (Image credit: Future)
The local gameplay thing basically involves Arm devices downloading and playing supported titles directly from the Xbox PC app, “including the majority of games included in Xbox Game Pass. This means local play for a much larger number of titles without relying on cloud streaming.” For now, that’s a feature that’s only available to Windows Insiders subscribers, not all Windows users.
Of course, a key element to gaming on Arm is emulation given most games are still exclusively coded for x86 chips. Microsoft added support for AVX and AVX2 extensions to the Prism emulation layer in Windows on Arm, patching a notable hole in compatibility.
Finally, Easy Anti-Cheat added Windows on Arm support through collaboration between Epic and Qualcomm, the latter being the main producer of Arm chips for laptop PCs. As a consequence, Microsoft says, “many widely used anti-cheat systems and their games now support Arm, including Fortnite.”
Rounding things out are enhancements to DirectX in Windows generally. Most notably, that includes new ray-tracing features, such as Opacity Micromaps and Shader Execution Reordering, which Microsoft claims can deliver up to 2.3x performance gains.
Microsoft also previewed its implementation for inserting neural rendering into the graphics pipeline in 2025. As for the future, Microsoft says it will roll out the Xbox full screen experience to more devices and add Advanced Shader Delivery to more games.
Another intriguing addition is Auto Super Resolution (Auto SR). That’s Microsoft’s OS-level AI upscaling feature. In other words, it’s Microsoft’s answer to Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR. Auto SR first shipped on Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X Arm chips. Microsoft says, “in early 2026 we’re bringing a public preview to the ROG Xbox Ally X, running on AMD’s Ryzen AI NPU.”
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how that compares with the upscaling technologies from the big GPU makers. But will it be enough? There’s substantial evidence, for instance, that SteamOS runs many games faster than Windows, for instance.
But is this actually the future of PC gaming? (Image credit: Future)
SteamOS is Linux-based, of course, and our own Josh made a pretty convincing case for “getting off this bus to hell called Windows on your gaming PC.” As Josh says, what with, “useless AI in every wazoo, constant upselling on Office 365, the feeling of a gradually tightening noose as more and more apps try to corral you into this or that walled garden,” Windows can be pretty grim. To that I’d add a choppy, unresponsive UI and incredibly intrusive update system.
Anyway, it’s hard not to conclude that this new blog post from Microsoft isn’t entirely convincing. Microsoft has always got plenty of details right for gaming on Windows. It’s set important standards with DirectX, but Windows has also always suffered from Microsoft’s money-making ambitions and a broader sloth related to its dominant, near-monopoly position. There are certain things Microsoft can’t be bothered with and the lack of competition means it basically doesn’t need to.
In really simple terms, the problem with Windows gaming isn’t the stuff Microsoft does for gaming. It’s the stuff it does and doesn’t do for Windows, generally. For now, it’s not clear if any of that has changed or will change.
Personally, I’m hoping that Valve’s Steam Machine really takes off and that Valve finally releases a fully generic, officially supported version of SteamOS for all PCs. Even for those gamers who don’t then move over to SteamOS, it will surely force Microsoft to up, well, its game.
