Microsoft Wants To Make Windows 'the Best Place To Game—no Matter...

On the desktop, in your hands, even on an Arm chip, Windows wants to be best.

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.

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.

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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.

Source: PC Gamer