The Windows 10 Insider Preview build 16215 for PC was a beast with tons of new features to explore. Since there was so much to cover, we at OnMSFT decided it best to break it down. Here’s what is new for gamers and developers in the most recent PC build.
The Game bar, accessible by hitting (Win+G) was tweaked with a new button to enable and disable Game Mode, a feature that was hidden until now in the Windows Games settings. Furthermore, taking screenshots and streaming quality have both been improved. Here is the full changelog so far:
- Based on your feedback, the Game bar (Win + G) now has a button to enable or disable Game Mode for the current game. Its icon will be updated soon in a future flight.
- The Game bar (Win + G) now allows you to take screenshots of games running in HDR. Sharing those screenshots to Xbox Live using the Xbox app will come in a future update of the app. Note: broadcasting does not support HDR. Screenshots will be taken in the resolution of the game window, which enables the 4K screenshots that are now supported. Game Clips and broadcasts will be transcoded to 1080p if the resolution is higher than that.
- Screenshots of games running in HDR should now correctly save a copy in PNG that is tone mapped to SDR.
- Bitrate changes during game broadcasting to Mixer should now be smoother and more seamless.
- When broadcasting to Mixer, you can now specify the language that you are speaking during the broadcast.
- The resources made available to games running in Game Mode have been tweaked on popular machine configs, including 6 and 8 core CPU machines, resulting in improved game performance for games running in Game Mode.
Developers, don’t worry, the Windows Insiders team hasn’t forgotten about you either. In an effort to improve development for Windows 10 and, by default, UWP apps, developers have their own list of improvements:
Per app Runtime Broker: If you open Task Manager, you will notice UWPs now use per-application instanced Runtime Broker processes, rather than all sharing a single session-wide Runtime Broker. This will help improve resource attribution, resource management, and fault tolerance.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) no longer requires Developer Mode! Previously, you had to enable Developer Mode (Settings -> Update & Security -> For Developers) in order to run Bash & Linux tools on Windows. This restriction has been lifted; you can now run Bash on Windows without developer mode being enabled! More information here
Hyper-V gets virtual battery support: You can now see your machine’s battery state in your VMs! To try this feature, create a new VM using the “New-VM” cmdlet, and add the “-Prerelease” flag. This will give you a pre-release VM that will have this feature enabled.
Other improvements including:
- Registry Editor is now per-monitor DPI aware! That means it should no longer be blurry when used in mixed DPI environments, or when changing DPI.
- We fixed an issue resulting in VIM being broken for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users in result flights.
- We fixed an issue where the choice command was failing when run in a Command Prompt script.
The Fall Creators Update is coming up fast, and with the debacle setting back the Windows team last week, it looks like they’re making up for lost ground. Be sure to check out what else is new in the Windows 10 Preview build 16215 for PC and take a glance at known issues.
