6 great features of Game Bar in Windows 10

Windows 10 May 2019 update brings a completely new Game bar experience. It is not just for video game shooting. Now it comes with many useful tools, including a quick control panel to adjust the app volume, see resource usage, and play Spotify music.

How to open Game bar

To open Game bar, press the shortcut Win + G The tool will appear as an overlay on the game you are playing. In addition, it also appears on the desktop or other applications you are using but most useful when playing games. To close it press Win + G again.

Microsoft still calls this Game bar, which can be misleading because it is now not just a bar, but an overlay with multiple tables. If you see a smaller bar, you have not installed the Windows 10 update May 2019.

While Game bar is displayed, you can click on the Home icon at the top of the table (it's like the menu button) to select the display panel in the overlay environment.

If you press Win + G without opening Game bar, make sure you turn it on. Go to Settings> Gaming> Game Bar , turn on Record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar and check if you have changed the shortcut Win + G to another key. If you like, you can set up using your shortcut to open Game bar here.

1. Adjust application volume

This feature is very useful even if you are not a gamer. You can press Win + G anywhere in Windows (even while playing a game) and use the Audio control panel to adjust the volume of any running application.

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2. Monitoring system performance

The Game bar provides a Performance panel that contains information about current CPU, GPU and RAM usage. You will see the current resource usage and usage graph in the last 60 seconds. To view this information, press Win + G while playing the game, without Alt + Tab anymore.

Even without playing the game, press Win + G to see this data faster when opening Task Manager.

Of course, you can still see this information in Task Manager. Task Manager Windows 10 can now display the overall GPU usage of the system and GPU usage of each individual application.

1. How to monitor GPU performance in Task Manager of Windows 10

3. Set up tables that are always on other windows

With Game bar tables, you can click on the Pin icon to make it always on other windows when using the system.

If pinning the volume control panel, it will appear on other windows when you are playing, giving you quick access to the application volume settings. You can drag the title bar in the overlay to move the table (or widget) around the screen.

4. Play music from Spotify

The game bar is now integrated with Spotify, click on the menu button and select Spotify to open it. You can log in to Spotify account and use Spotify widget to play music and control playback. This will be more convenient than pressing Alt + Tab to switch applications.

5. Video game recording (or any application)

You still see the Broadcasts & Capture panel in the Game bar because this is the original purpose of the Game bar, which provides a way to record game videos, screen captures and even live streams via Microsoft Mixer, formerly called Beam. You can also set auto-rotate in the background and choose to save at least the last 30 seconds of the game whenever you like the same on the Xbox One or PlayStation 4.

Although this feature focuses primarily on games, it is also a great desktop video recording tool. Open the Game bar, click on the record button and it will record any application on the screen with the microphone input you can turn on or off from the table. Click the stop button to end the video recording, you will get a video in mp4 format, saved in C: UsersNAMEVideosCaptures folder.

From the Game bar interface, you can browse and view all photos and videos of the screen, just click the Show All Captures link .

6. Chat on Xbox Live

Game bar was originally formed as a feature and hidden in the Xbox app. The new Game bar interface provides Xbox Social widgets. From here you can chat with your Xbox friends like on the Xbox control panel. It also has a Looking for Group table you can use to find friends to play games.

This feature is mainly useful for PC users gaming on Xbox One or Xbox 360. However, Microsoft is trying to build the Xbox ecosystem with services like Xbox Game Pass for PC, so it can be useful. more useful in the future.