Читать книгу Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies - Ciprian Adrian Rusen - Страница 38

Gaming is a big deal in Windows 11, and Microsoft wants its operating system to be the best choice for gamers.

HDR is a technology designed to make images resemble the real world as closely as possible. To make images look authentic, devices with HDR use wider ranges of colors, brighter light areas, and darker blacks for shades. DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to games.

If you have a monitor with High Dynamic Range (HDR) support, you can take advantage of a cool aspect of Windows 11: The auto HDR feature (see Figure 2-7), which intelligently expands the color and brightness range up to HDR of DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 non-HDR games. This seamless feature will give you a new gaming experience that takes full advantage of your HDR monitor’s capabilities.

There’s also dynamic refresh rate functionality, which automatically helps you switch between different refresh rates. For example, Windows 11 might use 60 Hz when reading your email or a Word document on your laptop, which lowers battery consumption on your laptop, but it then switches to 120 Hz automatically when gaming to give you the most fluid gaming experience.

A more interesting technical feature of Windows 11 that will affect the gaming of tomorrow but not today's is direct storage. This feature allows your Windows 11 computer to bypass the processor when it needs to load data from an NVMe solid-state drive to the graphics card. NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Express, is a standard software interface that enables SSDs and other components to run directly through the PCI Express (PCIe) physical interface directly attached to a computer's processor.

FIGURE 2-7: Auto HDR makes non-HDR games more beautiful in Windows 11.

Direct storage decreases the amount of processor power required by games when loading textures (the graphics you see on the screen), which means that games should load faster too. However, games must implement specific support for direct storage and, when Windows 11 was launched, no games provided that support. I expect direct storage support in games to be the norm in a couple of years.

To cater to the needs of gamers, Windows 11, just like Windows 10, has a game mode that starts automatically when it detects that you're playing something. You can also start it manually. Game mode prioritizes the processor and graphics card resources to your game. It also stops Windows Update from installing driver updates or showing update notifications during your play. Another useful feature is that it stops all notifications from all apps so that they don’t interfere with your game.

Another feature is the Xbox game bar. With it, you can take screen shots while you play and record videos of your gameplay. You can also use it to quickly adjust the audio and voice settings — useful when you play online with others and must coordinate with them. The Xbox game bar also shows you the performance of your computer (processor, RAM, and graphics card resource consumption) and allows you to chat and interact with your friends on Xbox, as shown in Figure 2-8.

FIGURE 2-8: The Xbox game bar has many features useful to gamers.

Press Win+G to display the Xbox game bar at any time, including when you're not playing. Familiarize yourself with all the buttons and features, so that you can use it productively while you play games.

I discuss Windows 11 gaming more in Book 4, Chapter 9.