Microsoft's Sarah Bond explained why Windows 11 will "deliver the best PC gaming experience ever" during Thursday's "What's Next for Windows" live stream, and expanded on that statement in a new blog post on Xbox.com Bond bases this claim on three pillars: "Superior graphics, blazing speed, and an amazingly rich game selection."

AutoHDR allows games to enhance their looks even without built-in HDR support, DirectStorage brings the speed of the latest SSDs to games, and full integration of Xbox Games Pass allows Windows 11 to bring the entire gaming The world will be at your fingertips, and with full integration of Xbox Games Pass, you can enjoy all your games in Windows 11.

Windows 11, the new version of Microsoft's flagship operating system, will be available in time for this year's holiday season. Chief Product Office Panos Panoy claimed, "If you are a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you."

That may seem a little over the top, but let's leave it at that. He's enthusiastic, he's cool.

AutoHDR is a feature that was introduced in Windows Insider builds this March. Basically, it adds high dynamic range (HDR) enhancements to standard dynamic range (SDR) games, as long as they are built using DirectX 11 or higher.

This feature allows games to render more levels of brightness and more colors than normal, "adding more richness and depth to the image."

It was first introduced on the Xbox Series X/S consoles and will remain in Windows 11; Bond has shown the effect in play with Skyrim, where people with potato faces look brighter than ever.

DirectStorage is another feature introduced in the latest consoles that leverages the power and performance of NVMe SSDs to shunt assets directly to the GPU, avoiding CPU bottlenecks that might otherwise occur.

This is only available on Windows 11, but means that game worlds can be rendered "at lightning speed without long load times."

The Xbox blog post also mentions that ""DirectStorage Optimized" Windows 11 PCs are configured with the necessary hardware and drivers to make this amazing experience possible. This presumably indicates that if you are running a Windows 11 machine that does not come with a high-performance NVMe SSD, you will not be able to take advantage of this feature.

However, DirectStorage has been found to work with PCIe 3.0 SSDs as well as the latest PCIe 4.0 drives.

The final piece of Bond's puzzle is the full integration of Xbox apps that will be built into Windows 11, provided you subscribe to Xbox Game Pass.

Game Pass Ultimate also allows access to Xbox Cloud Gaming on PC via a browser, so you can play the latest console games on almost any Windows 11 PC.

Windows 11 will also include other features such as access to Android apps via a revamped store, an all-new UI, etc. How effective will AutoHDR and DirectStorage ultimately be for the PC? I would love to see.