One reason Linux has become so popular for gaming in recent times is that it’s more resource-efficient than Windows 11, ultimately delivering much better performance. Windows 11 is far from the most performance-friendly OS, and unnecessary background bloat keeps it from being the ideal choice for gaming.

However, Microsoft is working on a major overhaul of Windows 11, and improving gaming performance is a key element of that effort. As part of their initiative to bring the Xbox and Windows ecosystems closer together, they recently debuted FSE (Xbox Full Screen Experience) on all Windows 11 desktop PCs, transforming them into full consoles. After trying it out, I found that the results were far more than just cosmetic.

What the Xbox Full Screen Experience actually changes

It’s not just a skin over Windows 11

Credit: Shaheer Khan/MUO

FSE aims to replicate the feel of a traditional console in a Windows environment, and it’s completely different from the Game Bar; instead, it’s closer to the experience you may find on the ROG Xbox Ally handheld devices. Microsoft initially designed this mode for those devices and has since brought it over to all Windows 11 PCs.

To give a brief rundown, FSE is quite similar to Steam’s Big Picture mode, offering a controller-first experience that lets you access all your games across platforms (e.g., Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect). Additionally, there’s a separate Store section to buy games or access Game Pass if you’re subscribed to the service, and the Friends tab, which is a vast improvement over the one in the older Xbox app for Windows.

Aside from this centralized experience, FSE prioritizes a gaming-first environment on your Windows 11 PC by reducing background clutter to free up CPU and RAM resources. Microsoft claims that FSE uses 9% less RAM than standard Windows 11 and that extra RAM can greatly improve frame rates in setups with lower-memory configurations.

The FPS gains are real — here is the proof

I found notable improvements in three games that I tested

It was hard for me to take Microsoft’s word for the performance improvements until I actually ran benchmarks and was surprised by the results. On my mid-end AM4 build featuring a Ryzen 5 5600, RX 5600XT, and 16GB DDR4 memory, I booted up Assassin’s Creed Mirage‘s new Valley of Memory DLC and noticed nearly a 13% performance increase in FPS when running FSE compared to vanilla Windows 11. I still wasn’t convinced by the results and thought they might be a fluke, so I tested two more titles: Rainbow Six Siege and Resident Evil Requiem. Much to my surprise, the performance improvements still persisted, and here are the test results I got:

For reference, I ran these games at native 1080p with high graphical settings. The performance improvements in Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Resident Evil Requiem were substantial due to the extra CPU and RAM resources freed. On Rainbow Six Siege, the difference wasn’t that big, since my configuration is already more than enough, and the extra Windows 11 overhead didn’t seem to bother it in the first place.

This also means that on higher-end systems, the difference won’t have much impact, since there are already plenty of resources to go around — even if Windows 11 hogs resources.

The new Game Bar overhaul that nobody’s talking about

Finally, a responsive and clean overlay that doesn’t tank your frames

With the entire industry pushing to turn PCs into a living room-friendly experience (e.g., Steam Machine), Microsoft isn’t trailing too far behind. It’s really nice to lie back on the couch, hook my PC up to my living room TV, and play video games as if I were booting from a console.

The UI is clean and uncluttered, and I can access whatever I want from there. Remember the Game Bar layout that everyone seems to hate for being performance-intensive? Well, the FSE completely revamps it, and I can’t believe that I’m saying that I love it so far. The layout has changed; the settings are much easier to navigate, and my games no longer experience frame rate spikes when I open the overlay. The new sound section is more accessible, and I can control each app’s volume individually; the Spotify integration works much better. From my experience with the FSE mode so far, the new Game Bar overlay is the best part.

Apart from that, the window switching is actually cool, and if you have a powerful system, you can replicate the Xbox Series X|S’s quick resume feature: once in the background, the app pauses briefly. You can run multiple games simultaneously that way, but only try this on a high-end PC, because even when the application is paused, it still consumes relatively high resources.

Some considerations before you turn on the Xbox Fullscreen Experience

Getting it to run wasn’t easy

Despite all its highs, FSE is not, by any means, perfect. You miss out on much of a PC’s functionality when switching to the mode, though that’s not really a design flaw since it aims to replicate a console’s feel.

The biggest problem I encountered was the hoops I had to jump through to get full-screen mode to work for the first time. I’m on Windows 11 25H2, but I still didn’t have FSE available, so I had to download ViVeTool to make changes to the Windows 11 Registry and enable it forcibly.

On my first run, I also didn’t notice any performance difference, which was shocking until I looked up the reason and found out that for the performance to make a difference, the Xbox app had to boot alongside Windows, and I had it disabled — otherwise, it wouldn’t know which services to close and free up resources.

Should you enable the Xbox Fullscreen Experience?

The freedom of desktop gaming is lovely, but once in a while, I want to sit back, grab my controller, and just boot up a video game sitting on my sofa. With future updates and continued refinement from Microsoft, FSE has the potential to improve even further. Much of this progress is credited to Valve for its work on SteamOS, a gaming-focused operating system that is pushing Microsoft to improve Windows 11 for gaming. Desktop gaming is evolving, and the console-hybrid setup might just be the future for them.

Still, whatever choice you make between FSE and SteamOS, it’s lovely to see healthy competition at the end of the day.