As famous by a Reddit person and confirmed by Ars Technica, Microsoft’s xCloud recreation streaming appears to be like noticeable worse when working on Linux than Home windows. From the report: With the Linux Person-Agent, edges are typically much less sharp and colours are a bit of extra washed out. The distinction is much more obvious if you happen to zoom in on the Forza brand and menu textual content, which reveals a big discount in readability. Curiously, the dip in high quality appears to go away if you happen to allow “Readability Increase, an Edge-exclusive function that “provid[es] the optimum appear and feel whereas taking part in Xbox video games from the cloud,” in line with Microsoft. That is nice for Linux customers who converted to Microsoft Edge when it launched on Linux final November. However Linux customers who follow Firefox, Chrome, or different browsers are at the moment caught with apparently diminished streaming high quality.
That Linux high quality dip has led some to take a position that Microsoft is making an attempt to order one of the best xCloud streaming efficiency for Home windows machines in an try to draw extra customers to its personal working system. However utilizing a Macintosh Person-Agent string gives streaming efficiency much like that on Home windows, which might appear to be an enormous omission if that principle have been true. Microsoft additionally hasn’t printed any type of “greatest on Home windows”-style advertising and marketing in selling xCloud streaming, which might seemingly be a key element of making an attempt to draw new Home windows customers. (The standard distinction may very well be a roundabout try to get Linux customers to modify to the Edge browser, the place Readability Increase presents the very best high quality. However that also would not totally clarify why Home windows customers on different browsers, with out Readability Increase, additionally get higher streaming high quality than their Linux brethren.)
Others have instructed that the downgrade may merely be a bug brought on by Microsoft’s naive parsing of the Person-Agent strings. That is as a result of the Person-Agent strings for Android browsers typically establish themselves as some model of Linux (“Linux; Android 11; HD1905,” for instance). Microsoft’s xCloud code may merely see the “Linux” in that string, assume the person is working Android, then routinely throttle the streaming high quality to account for the (presumably) diminished display measurement of an Android telephone or pill.
