What is interesting is how the cloud portion uses the Xbox Game Bar for its menu system, instead of the Xbox guide menu. I'm sure that will come in a later update, though. The Xbox app doesn't seem to be navigatable using an Xbox controller at this time, which is a bit of a miss considering you can't use a mouse and keyboard to play any of the games available on Xbox Game Pass cloud gaming. Despite these hurdles, Xbox Game Pass cloud gaming remained completely viable. In my scenario, I'm simply physically too far away from the router for it to be completely flawless. For those who want a better experience, configuring your home Wi-Fi to force a 5GHz SSID can improve the experience in some cases. I also tried out the new console-to-PC streaming feature, and found that it provided a similarly great experience - far superior to that of the old Xbox companion app, which is due to be retired in Windows 11. I could feel the added latency from using a Bluetooth controller coupled with my less-than-ideal network environment here, but it was completely playable and very easy to adjust to.

NieR:Automata ran near-flawlessly, hitting 60 frames with ease.

I tried a few games out and I was once again reminded of Microsoft's prowess in the cloud space. As such, I'd expected Xbox Game Pass cloud gaming to offer a similarly laggy experience here, but it was not the case. Based on my Wi-Fi where I presently am, it was just too laggy and choppy to get any sense of how the game played. The company was using competing cloud provider Shadow to let previewers remote in and play games from the cloud. I was recently invited to a game preview, but was unable to attend due to my network quality. My laptop doesn't have the best network card in the world. The performance delta between the current servers and the state of the servers last year is truly massive, and despite having a pretty rough network environment where I presently am, I found the experience to be more than viable. Microsoft has recently upgraded their cloud servers to Xbox Series X-level hardware, though, offering boosted speeds and more rapid video encoding. If your home Wi-Fi isn't good enough for Xbox Game Pass on your phone, it probably won't be good enough for cloud gaming on your PC either.

Indeed, this is still cloud gaming and comes with all the expected limitations therein.

Xbox xcloud pc