Windows 10 Xbox game streaming - actually not too bad

CyberneticTitan · September 6, 2015

So today I decided to test the Xbox Game streaming feature in Windows 10. I've seen feedback from quite a bit of users that they see lack of purpose for the Xbox streaming app because one should be using direct Xbox to monitor/TV for the best experience and while they are not wrong, they should think a bit outside the box, as I have done here.

For this test, my PC and Xbox One were both connected to the same router using wired connections.

I fired up the Xbox App and Nvidia Geforce Experience, fired up Shadowplay and Game streaming and went ham. Shadowplay recorded the Xbox app using Very High settings. I'm not sure if there is a way to directly save the game stream but the Shadowplay result and the Xbox App video stream were pretty similar. Windows 10's built in Game DVR limited me to 30FPS so that wasn't a good choice. You could alternatively use other apps such as OBS, Dxtory, etc, but Shadowplay is what I decided to go with. AFAIK, OBS also supports Nvidia NVENC so you can offload encoding work to the GPU without Nvidia Geforce Experience.

Open in a new window for 60FPS goodness:

I apologize for the video only being 26 seconds, but I have really bad upload speeds. It took me around 20 minutes for this to upload.

The video even before YouTube compression had noticeable compression artifacts and the audio is just washed out and nowhere near the audio quality of the pure Xbox audio. However, given that it is a free Xbox recording solution that is undoubtedly superior than Xbox Game DVR which as of this post is limited to 720p 30FPS, it is actually not too shabby. Some monitors and TVs have an audio out/headphone jack and if you combine that audio stream with the Xbox app's video stream, you have a pretty decent game recording setup. Hey you could even use the headphone jack on the Xbox One controller for an audio source and it would still be good.

Overall, if you don't have the funds for a dedicated capture device like something from Elgato or Avermedia, then Windows 10 Xbox game streaming is a spectacular solution.