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.