In context: If you’ve already tried Xbox Cloud Gaming on browsers, perhaps you’ve noticed that image quality isn’t always the best, deteriorating the overall gaming experience. Besides looking blurry more often than it should, the colors also tend to be a bit off. A new feature Microsoft has been working on promises to improve these shortcomings.
Named Clarity Boost, the new feature results from the joint work between the Xbox Cloud Gaming and Edge browser teams, hence why it only works with Microsoft’s browser. This feature promises to improve visual quality in games streamed over Edge browser via multiple client-side scaling improvements.
To try Clarity Boost, you’ll need to have Microsoft Edge Canary version 96.01033.0 or later. You may download it from the Edge Canary channel and confirm the version by accessing edge://settings/help.
To enable the feature, go to www.xbox.com/play, log in and pick a game to play. Then, open the more actions menu (three dots), search for the ‘Clarity Boost’ option, and enable it. Based on the image below, you should see a noticeable improvement in visual quality right after turning the option on, improving overall image sharpness, detail and colors.
Side-by-side comparison of Clarity Boost disabled (left) and enabled (right)
For those who don’t want to download Edge Canary, Microsoft states Clarity Boost will be available to all Edge users sometime next year.
Considering the new Edge browser is based on the Chromium engine, other browsers running on it should also be capable of benefiting from Clarity Boost. However, we can’t find any reason for Microsoft to do it. By being exclusive to Edge, the browser actually has a key feature that other browsers don’t, which might be reason enough for some gamers to start using Microsoft’s browser.