Source: Miles Dompier / Windows Central (Image credit: Source: Miles Dompier / Windows Central) Is Xbox Cloud Gaming worth trying on Steam Deck? When it comes to my experiments with Valve's handheld, I was roughly 3 feet away from a dual-band wireless router, which for my space, is the best-case scenario. By contrast, my latest efforts to stream Xbox Game Pass titles on my Surface Duo 2 via 5G haven't provided consistent results and, in some cases, has been markedly worse than my initial testing on the Steam Deck. In previous tests with mobile devices, I've had superior latency streaming via the Xbox Game Pass app while connected to a dual-band router with 1 gig down. After a few minutes of playing, my brain eventually acclimated to the latency, but this tangible input delay absolutely impacted my overall gameplay experience in a negative way. However, when trying to get in some intense rounds of Halo Infinite's multiplayer, the delay became dramatically more noticeable.

With simplistic side-scrolling platformers like Infernax, the input delay I experienced felt relatively minor and manageable. What about the dreaded input latency that typically comes with game streaming? In this respect, I was far less impressed with Xbox Cloud Streaming on Steam Deck. Obviously, there are some noticeable downgrades when directly compared to native gameplay from the Xbox Series X|S, but as a convenient standalone experience, you likely won't notice a huge difference. Resolution and fidelity, especially on the Steam Deck's 7-inch display, are consistently impressive, and I rarely noticed any extreme artifacting. Now it's time for the two most important questions - first, how do games look and feel with Xbox Cloud Gaming on Steam Deck? Titles like Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon absolutely shine from a visual standpoint. Titles like Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 absolutely shine from a visual standpoint. Navigating the game hub with the Steam Deck gamepad feels fantastic, and getting in and out of games is generally quite speedy.

However, when the client functions as intended, it's undeniably impressive. The client itself is finicky, and occasionally certain titles on Xbox Cloud Gaming won't open without a restart. As the name and entire setup process suggest, this is very much a beta.

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