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Cloud gaming with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is available across PCs, mobile phones and tablets, with more supported devices coming soon.

I write software for Windows. Exclusively for Windows. These days, VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop are two very mature virtualization products that allow clients to run virtually any Windows software on the Mac. Right now I have a client reporting an issue under VMWare Fusion 5. It’s an important client, so I’d better support him. My options to reproduce the issue are to buy a Mac Mini, or try out a virtual mac hosting service.

1. Your session is about to expire, press 'Logout' to logout and 'Close' to continue. You will be logged-out after 5 minutes automatically.
2. XCloud is a little more limited in terms of streaming quality as it currently does not support 4K resolutions. This is because the current infrastructure for the xCloud is based on Xbox One S.
3. Apple lets you play Stadia and xCloud games on iOS (after you download them) When we think about the state of mobile gaming and gaming in general today, we have to include streaming services like Stadia and xCloud. They may suffer from “childhood diseases” in their current state but many tech experts believe that streaming is the future of.
4. With Project xCloud (Preview) players can play Xbox games on their mobile phone or tablet directly from the cloud, including favorites such as Devil May Cry 5, Tekken 7, Gears 5, Forza Horizon 4, and many more — no waiting for downloads.

I need the following things

• Root access. I need to install the software I want to test, including VMWare Fusion.
• OS X Mavericks. I need the latest version of the operating system.

I’m reviewing these services based on my needs of occasional full speed access for testing. If you’re after a dedicated server for an application like web hosting, you will have different needs than I have.

Here’s a list of all of the services that I could find offering roughly the kind of service I’m looking for.

Some of these services offer cheaper plans with a more limited feature set (e.g. no root access). I’ve chosen in most cases to review the cheapest plan that offers Mavericks and that offers root access to your VM.

I had every intention of trying out xcodeclub, vmosx and xcloud. However due to time constraints I ended up testing xcloud only.

xcloud is an offering from innofield who also provide the “Flow App Engine” (flow.ch).

Three plans are offered, all include Mavericks and root access. The cheapest one (“mini”) is 79 CHF, which is USD $~85/month at today’s exchange rates. For that you get 80gb storage, 2gb RAM, and 2 x 2.3GHz CPU cores.
No trial offered, but I asked for a 1 week trial via their contact form anyway. They were happy to oblige. I’ll be trailing a “pro” instance with 160gb storage, 4gb RAM and 4 virtual CPU cores.

From the customer console, I am able to start and stop the virtual instance.

API Capabilities

A support engineer was kind enough to explain some of the capabilities of the snapshot API.

This is just as powerful as AWS or Azure, but it’s for Macs! Brilliant.

This API seems to be undocumented, I expect that this is a work in progress and that we’ll see more of this soon.

Documentation

Xcloud provides excellent documentation for some of the basics. The getting started guide covers every operating system you might consider connecting from. Some of the more common problems you might expect to encounter are well documented.

Connecting to the Instance

I imagine if you’re connecting from a Mac in the first place, this whole thing goes much smoother.

Right from the console, there’s a button to launch an HTML5 VNC client. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the HTML5 client to work. I tried Chrome, IE and Firefox. I got this error in every case.

I was able to connect just fine with TightVNC, however. My experience was pretty slow, but I attribute this to my own ADSL connection rather than anything to do with xcloud. This was just painfully slow.

To resolve this, the Xcloud documentation suggests installing TeamViewer. So I started an AWS windows instance, RDPd to it, installed TightVNC there, VNCd to the xcloud instance (RDP-to-AWS-to-VNC-to-xcloud is actually reasonably fast), installed TeamViewer, then connected via TeamViewer. Phew! Happily, this all works just fine.

The only improvement to this would be if xcloud installed TeamViewer by default. VNC from Windows is just too slow.

Testing

Network connection seems more than acceptable. I was able to download a 4gb ISO from MSDN in less than 20 minutes.

I have full root access, so installing VMWare Fusion was not a problem. I couldn’t install 64-bit Windows, but the 32-bit version went in just fine.

The performance of this VM seems to be very good. It has no problem running a VM within a VM. My performance bottleneck is clearly the Internet connection speed to my own office.

Support

Xcloud support were quite responsive, and provided useful and timely answers to all of my questions.

Budget conscious? Xcodeclub might work out for you. But if you want a real killer go with xcloud for a few dollars more. You wont be disappointed.

After more than two months of beta testing, Microsoft is readying the launch of its xCloud Game streaming platform on Safari, Edge, and Chrome in the “next few weeks.” This comes after Microsoft had been pushing to bring xCloud to the App Store.

The company made the announcement today in a blog post about “bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone.” Here’s what Microsoft said:

In the next few weeks, cloud gaming on the browser will open to all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members. With Edge, Chrome, and Safari support, players will be a click away from gaming on almost any device.

Microsoft wanted to offer the xCloud Game platform as an app on the App Store, but since Apple policies don’t allow app stores inside the App Store, the Redmond had to scrap its plans last year.

Xbox Cloud Gaming Ios Lag

In April, Microsoft announced it was going to open the beta test program of xCloud Game on web browsers. To enjoy the platform, users must be an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriber.

The public beta offered access to over 100 Xbox Game Pass titles. The official Game Pass has around 300 titles that are expected to work with xCloud Game without the need of a TV or a monitor, just a web browser on your iPhone and iPad, for example.

In the blog post, Microsoft also noted that “Cloud gaming through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will launch in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and Japan later this year” as well.

With E3 starting this Saturday, Microsoft could be preparing to give more details about the xCloud Game at the conference.

Are you looking forward to playing your favorite Xbox games on Safari with your iPhone and iPad? Tell us in the comment section below.

Xcloud Osx Vs

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