Microsoft has finally realized that SteamOS is rapidly eating into the market share of its Windows 11 ecosystem by providing players with a better gaming experience. This pressure prompted Microsoft to launch "Project K2", an initiative to significantly improve the operating system for gamers and ordinary users. At the same time, the company has also officially launched "Xbox Mode" for Windows 11 PCs, which transforms your device into an "Xbox full-screen experience."
The latest tests show that this mode brings considerable performance gains on both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards, and improves the overall experience in multiple games.
Recently, blogger Ancient Gameplays used RX 9070 and RTX 4070 Ti Super graphics cards with AMD Ryzen 9 9700X processor to conduct an Xbox mode performance analysis on 11 games. Test games include "CS2", "Resident Evil: Requiem", "Red Desert", "Battlefield 6", "Conscious Being", etc.
Test results show that after turning on Xbox mode, the RTX 4070 Ti Super's 1% low frame rate at 1080p resolution increased by 15%, the low frame rate at 1440p increased by 25%, and the overall average frame rate increased by 7%. For the RX 9070, the average performance improvement is not obvious, with an overall improvement of only 2% at 1080p and almost no substantial improvement at 1440p.
The biggest performance improvements occur in CPU-bottlenecked games such as CS2 and Resident Evil: Requiem.
"CS2" on RTX 4070 Ti Super: the 1080p average frame rate is increased by 14%, and the 1% low frame rate is doubled; the 1440p average frame rate is increased by 23%, and the 1% low frame rate is increased by 2.5 times. The improvement on the RX 9070 is not so obvious.
Similarly, in "Resident Evil: Requiem", on the RTX 4070 Ti Super, the 1% low frame rate at 1080p increased by 22%; on the RX 9070, the 1% low frame rate at 1080p increased by 12%. At 1440p resolution, the difference is much smaller.
Regardless, Windows 11’s Xbox Mode achieves these performance gains by turning off the desktop and unnecessary background tasks. It also reduces controller lag and allows you to launch games from any third-party store.