Microsoft is currently testing a feature to improve picture quality in Xbox Cloud Gaming, whose service lets you play novelty games through an Internet browser even on a dilapidated computer. Clarity Boost, as they call it, aims to make the game look better through some processing on the client side. This feature is currently only supported in the beta version of the Microsoft Edge browser, which is expected to roll out to regular Edge soon.
Playing your favorite games even on a junk PC is an appealing prospect, but the nature of running the game on a remote server while streaming the screen to the player as video comes at a cost. by input lag and image quality. Clarity Boost aims to help with that second problem.
Microsoft’s notification explains that Clarity Boost “uses a series of client-side scaling enhancements to improve the visual quality of the video stream.” That’s all they say, though they offer a comparison in Gears Tactics:
Not bad, that. Maybe a bit sharp but not so monstrous. And yes, it’s only available in Edge and it’s not my browser of choice, but Windows 10 installs Edge anyway so whatever.
If you play cloud games and like testing novelty, you will need download Microsoft Edge Canary, the test version of their browser. From there, start the cloud game as usual, then look for Enable Clarity in the More Actions menu. Microsoft do warning that you may “notice a decrease in device performance (e.g. increased battery consumption)” if you’re using it, although that’s not surprising.
I’ve long been skeptical of ‘image enhancement’ technologies, because they were just trash when they were first introduced. Too much weird excessive sharpness and other ugliness that looks like a bad ‘HD’ Skyrim texture pack mod. Nvidia’s DLSS technology seems good enough these days to be a very welcome feature in ‘free’ performance games, and I’ve also heard good things about AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution . If my old GeForce supports it, I’ll definitely use DLSS.
What about Xbox Cloud Gaming anyway? Do any of you use it? As my computer deteriorated, I was sometimes tempted by engaging video games in turn-based or non-splash genres. I’ll confess: the extra money I have to upgrade anything is mostly consumed by my bike. Although the global bike parts shortage could be worse than the global GPU shortage. The question is: is XCG good at playing video games?
