Microsoft’s Fall Creators Update has good news for developers and players who have been hoping UWP would up its game, or in this case, games. Until now, UWP games were designed to run in environments made for lightweight entertainment, leaving a lot of the hardware on your PC or Xbox free for other applications, but also leaving something to be desired about the games themselves.
Well, developers will be free to make UWP games far more powerful and robust now. Microsoft is lifting the resource limitations on games, which were particularly hard for UWP games. UWP games will now be able to utilize six exclusive cores instead of the four they were previously restricted to, 5GB of RAM instead of 1GB, and full access to a system’s GPU instead of access to only half of it. The latter does come with a caveat: games only have full access to GPU if they use DirectX 12’s Direct3D API.
Graphic from the Windows blog.
This expanded resource access means a dramatic boost for game performance and a much larger sandbox for developers. The Fall Creators Update for PC and Xbox have both been released in the last couple of weeks, so now we’re waiting on your word as to how useful this expansion of resources is to UWP game developers.
So do you think these new updates will improve UWP games substantially? Increase the development of UWP games? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter. If you want to get started with UWP development yourself, check out our e-books, beginning with UWP Succinctly, or freshen up your knowledge with our UWP white paper series.