Xbox Game Bar Features

6 Great Features in Windows 10’s Game Bar

Win+G it with Xbox Game Bar, the customizable, gaming overlay built into Windows 10. Xbox Game Bar works with most PC games, giving you instant access to widgets for screen capture and sharing, finding new teammates with LFG, and chatting with Xbox friends across Xbox console, mobile, and PC—all without leaving your game.

If Windows+G doesn’t do anything, make sure the game bar is enabled. Head to Settings > Gaming > Game Bar, ensure the “Record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar” option is enabled, and check that you haven’t changed the shortcut from Win+G to anything else. If you set a custom shortcut, use that instead of Win+G.

1)Adjust Application Volume: This feature is useful even if you’re not a gamer! You can press Windows+G anywhere within Windows (including while playing a game) and use the Audio panel to adjust the volume of any running applications.

2)Monitor System Performance: The game bar also offers a Performance panel that provides information about your current CPU, GPU, and RAM usage. You’ll see current resource usage and a graph of the usage over the last 60 seconds. Just press Windows+G while playing a game to see this information—no Alt+Tabbing necessary. 

Even if you aren’t playing a game, pressing Windows+G to see this can be faster than opening the Task Manager.

3)Make any Panel always on Top: For this or any other panel, you can click the “Pin” icon to make the panel appear always on top while you use your system. If you pin the volume panel, it will appear always on top of whatever you’re doing, offering quick access to application volume settings.

4)Play Music from Spotify: The game bar now features Spotify integration—click the menu button and select “Spotify” to pull it up. You can sign in to your Spotify account and use the Spotify widget to play music and control playback. This should be more convenient than Alt+Tabbing out of any full-screen games.

5)Capture Videos of Gameplay (Or any Application): The Broadcasts & Capture pane is still here. This was the original purpose of the Game bar, offering a way to record your gameplay, capture screenshots. You can even have it automatically record in the background and choose to save the last 30 seconds of gameplay whenever you like—just like on an Xbox.

While this tool is focused on gameplay, it also makes an excellent desktop screen recorder. Open the game bar, click the record button, and it will record whatever application is on your screen—complete with microphone input, which you can toggle on or off from the panel. Click the stop button afterward, and you’ll get a clip in .mp4 format, saved to your C:\Users\NAME\Videos\Captures folder.

6)Chat on Xbox Live: The new game bar interface offers an “Xbox Social” widget, too. From here, you can chat with your Xbox friends just like you can on an Xbox console. There’s also a “Looking for Group” panel you can use to find friends to play games with.