Microsoft today announced new AMD Ryzen-powered Xbox Ally gaming handhelds. There is a duo of these new devices, and they run Windows 11. The version of Windows 11 (Home) running on these new handhelds is specially optimized, says Microsoft.
Jason Beaumont, the Vice President of experiences at Xbox, said that the new Xbox Ally consoles are essentially running an optimized and bloat-free Windows 11. He said:
"We were able to take people who have been working on the Xbox OS for 20 years or more and have them work directly on the Windows codebase and start reimagining what that operating system looks like for this form factor. When the player boots into the full-screen experience, there is a whole bunch of Windows stuff that doesn’t get loaded. We’re not loading the desktop wallpaper, the taskbar, or a bunch of processes that are really designed around productivity scenarios for Windows."
Roanne Sones, corporate vice president of gaming Devices and ecosystem at Xbox added: "We’ve reduced many notifications and pop-ups, and we will continue to listen to feedback from players to make continued improvements."
Brianna Potvin, principal software engineering lead at Xbox, further added some details about memory optimizations:
"This isn’t surface-level changes, we’ve made significant improvements. Some of our early testing with the components we’ve turned off in Windows, we get about 2GB of memory going back to the games while running in the full-screen experience.
If you’re booting your device into the full-screen experience and you’re putting it down and it’s going to sleep, it draws one-third of the idle power draw than if it was booting the same device into the [Windows] desktop experience."
Via: The Verge
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