Ever since Microsoft rolled out their Universal Windows Platform or UWP, it has constantly been under fire. While UWP is a great idea and a welcomed one, a lot of people haven’t too fond on how it has been handled. Especially since issues have cropped up in several of Microsoft’s UWP titles such as Killer Instinct, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Gears of War: Ultimate and even the recently released Quantum Break. And to my own personal experiences with the previously mentioned games hasn’t been as good as I’d hoped it would be. So I agree with many of the complaints that I’ve seen going around. However, it seems that Microsoft has been listening to the complaints from both developer and consumer and has announced a huge change that is taking place as of today.
As reported on the Microsoft DirectX Developer Blog, Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 will be updated to support both Nvidia’s G-Sync and AMD’s Freesync technologies. In addition, any current and upcoming UWP applications and games will also have an unlocked frame rate as well. The newly announced updates will be rolled out to Windows 10 machines, however, you can also download it manually here.
As a direct response to your feedback, we’re excited to announce the release today of new updates to Windows 10 that make gaming even better for game developers and gamers.
Once applications take advantage of these new features, you will be able to play your UWP games with unlocked frame rates. We expect Gears of War: UE and Forza Motorsport 6: Apex to lead the way by adding this support in the very near future.
However, while this does seem like a step in the right direction, I wonder how much of a difference this will make to developers. UWP hasn’t exactly been something that many developers have been keen to develop on. And while UWP is an attempt to make a unified platform, the issue here is that PC users / gamers are used to having a large amount of options available to them. The ability to use multi-GPU configurations, multiple input devices and even the ability to modify their games, all of which aren’t available in any UWP games currently. For UWP to get to where other digital platforms services such as Valve’s Steam, Microsoft will need to give developers more access than they currently have and there needs to be a reason to actually use the Windows 10 store.
Source: DirectX Developer Blog
