Microsoft's New Year's resolution is to be as good as SteamOS.

Microsoft continues to be rattled by how well games run on SteamOS compared to Windows 11. While they have already started to make some improvements, namely for handhelds, they apparently have several more ideas on how to improve gaming performance within Windows 11. Their plan seems to be to roll out these improvements throughout 2026.

In a new Windows Experience Blog, Microsoft states that they are committed "to make Windows the best place to game." They open with a recap of some of the recent improvements made to improve gaming performance. Those improvements include the console-like full screen experience for handhelds. It also includes Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD), which pre-compiles shaders and includes them in each game download.

Microsoft also mentions about how they tuned power management and CPU frequency profiles for their ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. They also mentioned about how they reduced frame-time variance and on Ryzen APUs, and also lowered CPU overhead for controller input, RGB lighting, graphics drivers, and background process.

In 2026, gamers can expect to see several other improvements. Microsoft already announced that they will roll out the DirectX Raytracing 1.2 update. This update includes two features, Opacity Micromaps and Shader Execution Reordering, to improve performance. Neural rendering is currently available as a preview, which should help speed up things like denoising and upscaling.

Beyond those improvements, Microsoft also plans to release an Xbox full screen experience for Windows 11 (pictured above) versions outside of handhelds. This will bring a controller-friendly interface that will let you quickly access your games across various libraries. You can currently preview this for yourself right now if you are an Insider.

Microsoft will also expand their Advanced Shader Delivery system. They will add more ASD support for ROG Xbox Ally titles as well as beginning to integrate this system into additional hardware and storefronts. Hopefully this comes sooner rather than later as it could appear on storefronts such as Steam, eliminating the lengthy shader pre-compiling period at first launch, after a driver update, or after a game update in some cases.

Auto Super Resolution is also on the way. This would be an operating system-level AI upscaling feature similar to Nvidia's DLSS. The difference here is that a developer doesn't need to integrate this into their games as it should be supported on most DirectX titles. Auto Super Resolution is currently available on Copilot+ PCs that use Snapdragon X processors. In early 2026, Microsoft will roll out a public preview for the ROG Xbox Ally X.

While many of these improvements are currently focused on handheld devices, the hope is to get many of these improvements more broadly rolled out to all Windows 11 devices.