My confusing, 10-day journey to getting a UWP game to work on Windows 10

Four games, 15 months, Windows 10, and a zoo of confusing crashes later...

Read the whole story

 

[Digital Dud]

I like how UWP games seem really lightweight with less jank than Win32 counterparts. Like alt+tabbing out of fullscreen games is often really slow and janky on Windows as D3D resources get reset and have to be restored, etc. And I'm always crossing my fingers that it doesn't crash in the process, but UWP never skips a beat.

 

[Akemi]

Frankly, I don't know what you all are doing to your PCs to make the Windows Store so unreliable.

"Works for me" is never a good argument given the diversity of the PC ecosystem. With UWP, Microsoft had the opportunity to build a more reliable and robust platform from scratch. Yet people are still having all sorts of issues with it. At this point, the chances I'll be buying a UWP game are about as good as me buying a GFWL one.

"Doesn't work for me" is just as bad.

To be clear, I have had problems installing things from the Windows Store before. They were all solved by running wsreset.exe. But the benefits have far outweighed the issues. Having a single software repository that remembers what I purchase, downloads things in a single click, keeps everything up to date automatically, uninstalls everything cleanly, built directly into the OS is absolutely beneficial.

The point isn't whether it works for you or not. It's that Microsoft had the chance to apply the lessons learned from their own (and others) experience to produce something more reliable and easier to troubleshoot than the competition. Instead, it appears they did the opposite.

Except in this case, the crash was caused by a 3rd party application that's been shown to crash numerous other games as well.

TLDR: Get rid of your software that tries to hook executables to monitor performance. It causes issues with more than just UWP apps.

How is a normal user supposed to discover this? From the article:

When standard Windows executables fail to turn over but don't crash as a result of, say, a power surge or other hardware-specific failure, error codes and crash notices are common—and they're often easily exposed by crash logs. UWP apps keep that kind of information under wraps

The point here is that Microsoft chose to obscure any sort of error reporting, making troubleshooting far more difficult.

How is that any different for the myriad of games bought via Steam, Origin, Uplay, or GOG? All services that offer games which crash when the Rivatuner Statistics Server is running with Afterburner, leaving you with the same generic application stopped working message? There's a reason that in every thread about crashing games, people mention Afterburner and disabling the Statistics Server or just not running Afterburner at all.

The Rivatuner Statistics Server has been notorious for causing issues in many games for so very long. It's literally the one thing UWP can not be blamed for causing. The obfuscation of installed files, horrible track record with UWP specific issues (like initially forcing v-sync on in games), and authentication issues are a different story.


Just do a Google search for: riva statistics server causing game crashing

One of the first links is to someone in the Steam forums complaining that Afterburner with Rivatuner Statistics is causing their games in the Steam Library to crash. Disabling the Statistics Server should be the first move if a game doesn't launch or crashes shortly there after.

 

[Akemi]

I like how UWP games seem really lightweight with less jank than Win32 counterparts. Like alt+tabbing out of fullscreen games is often really slow and janky on Windows as D3D resources get reset and have to be restored, etc. And I'm always crossing my fingers that it doesn't crash in the process, but UWP never skips a beat.

Just run games in borderless windowed mode. Same difference. Giving full screen control makes alt-tabbing a more risky proposition than when running games in a borderless window.

 

[samred]

The Rivatuner Statistics Server has been notorious for causing issues in many games for so very long. It's literally the one thing UWP can not be blamed for causing. The obfuscation of installed files, horrible track record with UWP specific issues (like initially forcing v-sync on in games), and authentication issues are a different story.


Just do a Google search for: riva statistics server causing game crashing

One of the first links is to someone in the Steam forums complaining that Afterburner with Rivatuner Statistics is causing their games in the Steam Library to crash. Disabling the Statistics Server should be the first move if a game doesn't launch or crashes shortly there after.

Agreed, and to clarify, I generally do NOT use RTSS, which is why I didn't mention it in this article. Once a game is working, I'll toggle it simply to check frame time performance.

 

[grommit!]

How is that any different for the myriad of games bought via Steam, Origin, Uplay, or GOG? All services that offer games which crash when the Rivatuner Statistics Server is running with Afterburner, leaving you with the same generic application stopped working message? There's a reason that in every thread about crashing games, people mention Afterburner and disabling the Statistics Server or just not running Afterburner at all.

The Rivatuner Statistics Server has been notorious for causing issues in many games for so very long. It's literally the one thing UWP can not be blamed for causing. The obfuscation of installed files, horrible track record with UWP specific issues (like initially forcing v-sync on in games), and authentication issues are a different story.


Just do a Google search for: riva statistics server causing game crashing

One of the first links is to someone in the Steam forums complaining that Afterburner with Rivatuner Statistics is causing their games in the Steam Library to crash. Disabling the Statistics Server should be the first move if a game doesn't launch or crashes shortly there after.

For the last time, the point isn't that RivaTuner was the source of the problem, it's that identifying this is needlessly difficult. But seeing as you asked:

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/sc2/topic/20759378619

The error logs I found for you all show RTSSHooks64.dll in them a bunch.

And as Sam noted (a) he doesn't use RTSS (b) Microsoft engineers were unable to diagnose the problem due to the lack of error reporting.

 

[Fred Duck]

UWP = Unwanted Windows Problems.

 

[mikewhy]

I like how UWP games seem really lightweight with less jank than Win32 counterparts. Like alt+tabbing out of fullscreen games is often really slow and janky on Windows as D3D resources get reset and have to be restored, etc. And I'm always crossing my fingers that it doesn't crash in the process, but UWP never skips a beat.

Just run games in borderless windowed mode. Same difference. Giving full screen control makes alt-tabbing a more risky proposition than when running games in a borderless window.

There's a performance overhead running Borderless Windows compared to Exclusive Fullscreen. It's not much these days, but it's there.

 

[UnnDunn]

My problem with articles like this are they are anecdotal, so this person has a hard time with UWP games, but I didn't see the research or evidence to back up this is a widespread problem for a lot of people. I play multiple UWP games including Forza Horizons 4 on my PC and have never had any problems.

So yet again, we get another opinion piece, which I personally think are garbage by their nature.

You aren't allowed to say that here. UWP is the devil. Do as you're told and accept it.

 

[chriskrum]

In a world where Steam has existed for fifteen years and Microsoft has had multiple visible failures in this very area, in this very core OS functionality, I am absolutely baffled by this. They're moving backwards and the competition isn't actually that good right now.

You're comparing a storefront to a sand boxed wall garden of an operating system.

It's not the same (unless you count every game crash caused by a game purchased on Steam against Steam.)

 

[richten]

The problem with things that "just work" when they hide a lot of complexity is when they simply don't want to work. I mean, sure it's nice when things are simple but when something goes wrong it all goes to hell and there is nothing you can do to fix it.

 

[BurntToShreds]

It seems like UWP wasn't the main culprit here, given this whole RTSS deal, but UWP still has its fair share of problems.

Really, if Microsoft wants to succeed in the PC gaming space, they need their games to ditch the Windows Store and UWP. If they want to make their mark and compete against Steam, the Xbox app on Windows needs to be revamped and turned into its own application and client separate from the Windows Store. From there, you can buy, manage, and install all of the Play Anywhere games that are attached to your Microsoft/Xbox account, as well as buy games from third-party devs that decide to release their games there. Maybe they could use their new MSIX packaging format for their games? They could be regular Win32 programs, but with the MSIX wrapper around them.

The Xbox/Games division at Microsoft has gotten a ton of freedom and power in the last couple years. It would be really awesome if they could get away from the technical issues and (deserved) bad reputation of UWP by using MSIX.

 

[Bob Servo]

The UI/XAML stuff in UWP is pretty nice to work with. Too bad it's castrated by that appcontainer sandbox.

 

[Wolvenmoon]

Fortunately I haven't yet encountered a UWP exclusive that I've wanted to play, but this just further reinforces my instinctive distrust of UWP.

I'm not going to play a game that I can't mod, edit, or use a trainer with to skip the boring bits on subsequent playthroughs. I'm sure as hell not going to police my background processes to turn off useful utilities just to make Microsoft happy.

I've been enjoying the kindler, gentler MS of the last decade, but this honestly feels like the bad old days of the late 90s, when MS abused its market dominance to dodge competition and dictate customer behaviors.

UWP can DIAF. At this point, if there's a UWP game I want, it's pretty likely that I'll buy it and then download the de-UWP'd pirate version to actually install and play.

It's very noble of you to actually buy it, but every purchase made only encourages bad practices and pirating the game has interesting effects in that it shows an uncaptured market - some developers see capturing that market as a matter of 'better' DRM which means an even crappier user experience.

I would strongly recommend avoiding UWP games entirely for that reason, and for the additional reason that Microsoft is apparently removing/uncracking its own software (Office, etc) with every OS update requiring you to go out and find a new crack on at least a monthly basis which repeatedly puts your rig and your data at risk.

In other words - there is no way to escape the nuisance barring not playing the game.

 

[SmilingRob]

I had trouble playing the FH4 demo, it had some error on startup when that xbox login box opens up. After some googling I found a video suggesting turning on all the “Xbox” services in Windows 10 services. After doing that, everything worked.

I notice you didn’t mention windows services in your article, so I thought I would bring it up.

 

[tobytyler]

Tried Resident Evil Biohazard as UWP after playing for a while on Xbox 1. It got as far as loading my save file and crashed... on a system that is no slouch hardware wise. Gave up and went back to the console. As far as I'm concerned, UWP is a four letter acronym. I'll leave it up to the reader to choose the first letter.

 

[SomeOtherName]

Thank you Ars for this! I was actually considering trying out the Windows Store due to the Forza games but this reconfirmed that I won't go near it. I've had my share of inexplicable error conditions on Windows 10 that I've never seen in previous OS releases. Including having the Assetto Corsa server .exe suddenly refuse to run in it's original folder. I don't mean, run and error, or run and hang, I mean just wouldn't start at all. I'm sure it was just some convoluted Win 10 permission corruption but I spent a head scratching week with the AC devs on their forum trying to figure out why absolutely nothing would report back from the application (including a custom build of the App - awesome support from their team). Eventually, we moved the server app out to a separate drive and it worked, meaning I had to manually manage the content for every update until, a few Windows releases later, it started working again.

 

[sqrt(-1)]

Reading this article (and the comments), I'm just glad I don't have to deal with this kind of problem anymore, either professionally or because it's happening on my machines at home —I no longer run MS Windows.

As an aside, if Sam is regularly having to redownload material that he's downloaded already on a data capped network connection then he would do well to install a transparent caching proxy server between his machines and his ISP.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm pretty baffled by this article. I'm far from being a computer expert. I'm no where near being a tech journalist. I'm a hobbyist and a gamer. Granted, my first game machine was a 386 which familiarized me with the arcane magic of memory managers and the like so my approach to crashes with new games is fairly methodical.

But this article is a fairly WTF?

Sam was running Afterburner the entire time.

The most basic trouble shooting step is to turn off (and not even start) background processes, especially those that hook into low level systems. Plus, any half-hearted attempt at searching for crash causes on the internet would have pointed one quickly to OSD utilities (and not just in the UWP enviroment).

I have to admit that this article shakes my faith a bit in Sam's professional competence.

If it was so simple to fix, why didn't Microsoft and the Forza team find the solution immediately?

The point is that UWP's error reporting is poor, its problem mitigation solutions are limited, and for a sandbox system that's supposed to separate and protect apps from each other, it doesn't even do its damned job.

Many people run low level programs all the time, for programming, debugging, content creation, and yes, recreation. Windows Store and UWP app developers need to accommodate users, not the other way around.

It is also curious in light of all the talk about how UWP is so great because it's all sandboxed and secure and such.

I would not have been surprised by a "UWP game broke my FPS overlay utility that does borderline malicious things to the running game to gather data" report(and I understand that a number of useful but architecturally adventurous utilities are broken in this context).

But that's not what happened here: the afterburner components were not only able to interfere with the game without any architectural/permissions interference; and the UWP context apparently frustrated even the efforts of Microsoft's people to diagnose the issue.


What's the deal? Are the actual architectural security measures markedly weaker than generally described? Is this one of the 'centennial' cases where Microsoft agreed to describe a mostly-win32 lump as UWP so long as a little wrapping was done and it went in the app store?

Is all that telemetry that win10 grovels up unequal to the task of detecting traces of a well known and common utility in the remnants of an application crash? Even after years of experience with 3rd party components being a major stability headache?

That I do not understand.

 

[jpotts]

Funny thing, it wasn't Afterburner causing your issue, it's another bit of software associated with it that runs in the background called RivaTuner Statistics Server(RTSS). Usually, a pretty useful piece of software, but sometimes clashes with some games.

Last night, after buying FH4 I ran into the same issue. Usually, I'm able to add the game's exe in RTSS, and turn it off for that game; however, when I attempted to add the ".exe" Windows blocked me saying RTSS needs privileges to do so. What a pain, instead I just ended up turning off RTSS, and leaving Afterburner running.

 

[Kasoroth]

This entire escapade sounds eerily similar to my own ill-advised adventures with getting cracked game executables running under an old version of Wine. I haven't done any recently, but I did once have quite the collection. The Elder Scrolls series up to Oblivion, the Mass Effect trilogy, Fallout 1-3, and a handful of others, all running under Linux with varying degrees of success and shader glitches. It's a delicate game of config file hacks and dark magic gleaned from obscure forum posts.

Now, I mostly just run Steam. As fun as it was, I ain't got time for these kinds of shenanigans anymore. Honestly, I'm astonished that a modern, paid product like this has glitches on par with my jury-rigged Linux nonsense.

The funniest part is that with the new Wine integration in the Linux Steam client, I've actually played a few Windows games in Linux recently to try it out, and they just worked seamlessly, without any of the frustration that people seem to be having with UWP. It would be funny if Steam on Linux became a better platform for distributing and playing Windows games than Windows Store on Windows.

Sure, there are still quite a few Windows games that still don't work right in Wine, but using the Steam-integrated Wine install was a surprisingly pleasant experience compared to my previous Wine experiences around 2010. For the past 6 years or so, I've been completely ignoring games without a native Linux port, but I might start considering Windows games that are known to run well in Wine, as long as Steam counts it as a Linux sale in their statistics.

 

[Silvernine]

I never had great experiences with the Windows Store. Last year, on two of my computers, for some reason, Windows Mail did not work (yes, I should have use an alternative mail client like Thunderbird). WSReset did not do the trick and in fact made it worse as Windows Store then for some inexplicable reason no longer starts (you get an empty window). I had to do a lot of difficult PowerShell commands to get it back to working order. I did not want to do a reset of the Windows installation because I had too many regular programs installed and it would have been a hassle. Then back in March of this year, Windows Store broke again somehow as I could not get LINE to update. It keeps giving some weird cryptic error. This occurred on all my computers. Once again, I had to go online to find ways to fix it through PowerShell. The worst thing this time around is that due to different versions of the currently installed app, the commands that work on one computer to get it up and running does not necessary work with the other three computers.

I appreciate the what Microsoft is trying to do. But this is by far the worst app store I have ever experienced. Apple's app store just works. Google Play Store just works. None of them are perfect but when problems do arise, they are generally easy to deal with. Hell, even those newer app stores that shows up in certain Linux distributions are working well and relatively easy to solve problems that shows up. Gaming consoles' store? Haven't had any issues with them before. Windows Store? For the most part, it works fine but when problems do show up, it's a total PITA.

 

[Voldenuit]

Funny thing, it wasn't Afterburner causing your issue, it's another bit of software associated with it that runs in the background called RivaTuner Statistics Server(RTSS). Usually, a pretty useful piece of software, but sometimes clashes with some games.

Last night, after buying FH4 I ran into the same issue. Usually, I'm able to add the game's exe in RTSS, and turn it off for that game; however, when I attempted to add the ".exe" Windows blocked me saying RTSS needs privileges to do so. What a pain, instead I just ended up turning off RTSS, and leaving Afterburner running.

Sam mentions in the comment section that he does not use RivaTuner. It's a couple posts up.

Agreed, and to clarify, I generally do NOT use RTSS, which is why I didn't mention it in this article. Once a game is working, I'll toggle it simply to check frame time performance.

 

[Aquawho]

In particular, you can't scroll through Windows Explorer folders (even "hidden" ones) and dig up installed UWP files, let alone see where they're installed or exactly which files and folders demand the most space on your hard drive.

You actually can, technically, but the folders are always deliberately buried and their names are basically gobbledygook (I think they're hashes).

I wonder if Windirstat would be of any help.

you can use Geek Uninstaller to find the UWP location. Click View menu then click on UWP. It will show you the list of UWP. Right click one of the UWP and then click "installtion folder" to reveal the folder of UWP app.

 

[Deleted member 1]

As for everyone complaining about UWP games, I point you to Far Cry Primal, a game that unless you run every program as an Administrator (Steam, Uplay, the actual game itself) it won't even run past the banner.

As for Ubisoft support, they indicated I should reinstall my Windows installation, which I had already done hours before buying the game.

Needless to say I told them to go fuck themselfs, eventually i figured it out myself, so UWP DRM isn't the only DRM that causes problem.

Of course every single UWP game I have, works flawlessly, the only games i have ever had a problem were from Uplay, Steam, and EA.

 

[boidsonly]

The faster UWP dies, the better...

 

[Mgamerz]

I develop software in C# WPF, and afterburner's bundled rivatuner has previously been a big nightmare. It injects itself into the d3d thread and for my apps would immediately crash them - no error message beyond event log faulting module.

I was really pissed that users were expecting me to support a third party program that was injecting code into my process and then being mad that it didn't work. I code my program against an expected environment, not one where third party programs hook into mine and crash it. I get why people use it - but I am of the mindset that you cannot be mad at programs not working when a third party program is hooking into it and causing unexpected behavior.

I emailed the dev for rivatuner and they put my apps on their blacklist, but it happened across multiple apps of mine doing nothing special - it even killed my Java swing app. None of them had anything remotely close to 3D in them beyond hardware acceleration.

 

[contextfree]

I'm pretty baffled by this article. I'm far from being a computer expert. I'm no where near being a tech journalist. I'm a hobbyist and a gamer. Granted, my first game machine was a 386 which familiarized me with the arcane magic of memory managers and the like so my approach to crashes with new games is fairly methodical.

But this article is a fairly WTF?

Sam was running Afterburner the entire time.

The most basic trouble shooting step is to turn off (and not even start) background processes, especially those that hook into low level systems. Plus, any half-hearted attempt at searching for crash causes on the internet would have pointed one quickly to OSD utilities (and not just in the UWP enviroment).

I have to admit that this article shakes my faith a bit in Sam's professional competence.

If it was so simple to fix, why didn't Microsoft and the Forza team find the solution immediately?

The point is that UWP's error reporting is poor, its problem mitigation solutions are limited, and for a sandbox system that's supposed to separate and protect apps from each other, it doesn't even do its damned job.

Many people run low level programs all the time, for programming, debugging, content creation, and yes, recreation. Windows Store and UWP app developers need to accommodate users, not the other way around.

It is also curious in light of all the talk about how UWP is so great because it's all sandboxed and secure and such.

I would not have been surprised by a "UWP game broke my FPS overlay utility that does borderline malicious things to the running game to gather data" report(and I understand that a number of useful but architecturally adventurous utilities are broken in this context).

But that's not what happened here: the afterburner components were not only able to interfere with the game without any architectural/permissions interference; and the UWP context apparently frustrated even the efforts of Microsoft's people to diagnose the issue.

What's the deal? Are the actual architectural security measures markedly weaker than generally described? Is this one of the 'centennial' cases where Microsoft agreed to describe a mostly-win32 lump as UWP so long as a little wrapping was done and it went in the app store?

That I do not understand.

The sandboxing for UWP apps is that they run at a lower permission level (AppContainer). This is meant to prevent UWP apps from messing with the system and other apps. It's not meant to prevent the system and other apps from messing with UWP apps - Win32 apps still run with higher permissions and can still fuck with whatever they want, including UWP apps. That's exactly what happened here - Afterburner (Win32) broke FH4 (UWP), FH4 didn't break Afterburner.


UWP apps are more secure in that you are protected from them, not that they themselves are protected from anything.

 

[fobzee]

I’ve had heaps of issues with Forza 7 and horizon 3 .

It seems to time out with authentication - if I haven’t launched the game in a week or so the game flashes up and just closes. I used to have to keep reinstalling but I’ve found a fix that works for me every time

Just install anything from the store - I just uninstall Netflix and reinstall it , only takes a sec

Horizon keeps losing my display settings after this but seems ok otherwise

 

[Ezzy Black]

I haven't had much experience with UWP games, but the few I've tried have worked without issue. Just finished playing Gears 4 with a Game Pass trial.

I wonder if there are issues with any other overclocking software. EVGA Precision seems to work fine.

No one here is going to like this at all, but that was my first thought. Not the software, the overclocking.

I recall an article years ago where Windows users were reporting a specific error message. Unable to figure out what caused it, Microsoft turned to Intel who told them that there was NO instance where the processor should report the error to the OS.

MS requested more information from a 100 user sample. more than 90 of the machines were overclocked, more than 70 without the user knowing it (or reporting that they knew it). These machines were probably overclocked at the factory and sold at higher speeds back when it was a simple jumper swap to change the modifier.

The fact that your overclocked machine will run certain benchmarks or games or run cool or whatever you regard as a "stable overclock" doesn't mean it won't cause problems in other situations.

My question to the author would be if he set his hardware back to the factory speeds and voltages and tried all this mess then. While I applaud the effort to get the most out of the hardware, it should be the first thing you do. Perhaps UWP is just more sensitive to such things.

 

[rock1m1]

I honestly had no major problems with uwp and windows store. My only real issue is how you cannot transfer game data to another drive without re-downloading the entire thing.

 

[vulpes vulpes]

On my machine, UWP refuses to work through a VPN. For instance, IE works without issue, while Edge passively aggressively suggests I make sure I got the right web address (or search for bing.com on Bing). Since I only use internet through a VPN — as a matter of basic hygiene — I am spared any interaction with UWP.

Edge used to not work through a VPN, but at some point it started to. I forget if it was an update or something I had to do. Most of the other MS stuff fails though. Store, WUpdate, OneDrive can't sync, Groove can't phone home and gets upset, Office sync stops working (though saving to the local OneDrive folder works, but as soon as I do something after ctrl+s it pops a banner again.)

 

[Leonick]

Afterburner isn't the issue. I have it running and FH4 runs with no issue. However maybe you have Afterburner doing some performance monitoring? For some of those stats Afterburner uses Rivatuner Statistics and that is software I've had suddenly become incompatible with games and cause crashes several times before to the point where I've given up on using it.

I've never had any issues with any of the games I've bought in the Microsoft Store. The store certainly isn't perfect though. The Forza Horizon 4 install button for example tried to install the included DLC before the game itself, this of course fails every time, had to go to the account page to find an install button for the game itself...

 

[RoninX]

While I'm no fan of UWP. There are games I've bought via both Steam and GOG that also crash if MSI's Afterburner is currently running in the background..

What bugs me about UWP isn't that there could be incompatibilities with third-party background apps. What bugs me is that while Steam and GOG treat you like a customer, UWP treats you like the enemy. Why else would UWP obfuscate where files are being stored?

Sure, the real enemies are the pirates, but Microsoft is willing to tolerate a ridiculous amount of collateral damage to paying customers.

 

[cimpleman]

It totally sounds like you just have a terrible computer for this stuff but you stubbornly keep on using it to try to run these games. You have a computer that fell through the UWP support cracks, get over it. Hopefully compatibility will get better over time. I've found UWP games to have roughly the same experience as other games, plus great ultrawide support.

 

[drumhellar916]

On my machine, UWP refuses to work through a VPN. For instance, IE works without issue, while Edge passively aggressively suggests I make sure I got the right web address (or search for bing.com on Bing). Since I only use internet through a VPN — as a matter of basic hygiene — I am spared any interaction with UWP.

I've had a similar problem: When I use Hyper-V, and install a virtual switch to provide network access to virtual machines, half of UWP apps can't access the internet.

 

[Excors]

I haven't had much experience with UWP games, but the few I've tried have worked without issue. Just finished playing Gears 4 with a Game Pass trial.

I wonder if there are issues with any other overclocking software. EVGA Precision seems to work fine.

No one here is going to like this at all, but that was my first thought. Not the software, the overclocking.

I recall an article years ago where Windows users were reporting a specific error message. Unable to figure out what caused it, Microsoft turned to Intel who told them that there was NO instance where the processor should report the error to the OS.

MS requested more information from a 100 user sample. more than 90 of the machines were overclocked, more than 70 without the user knowing it (or reporting that they knew it). These machines were probably overclocked at the factory and sold at higher speeds back when it was a simple jumper swap to change the modifier.

The fact that your overclocked machine will run certain benchmarks or games or run cool or whatever you regard as a "stable overclock" doesn't mean it won't cause problems in other situations.

My question to the author would be if he set his hardware back to the factory speeds and voltages and tried all this mess then. While I applaud the effort to get the most out of the hardware, it should be the first thing you do. Perhaps UWP is just more sensitive to such things.

I suspect you're recalling https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnew ... 7/?p=35923

 

[vjlex]

After years of lurking without commenting, I finally signed up to chime in on this article. I wholeheartedly agree with this article. I bought FH3 sometime last year, and to this day have only been able to open and play the app about 3 or 4 times. Below is the 1-star review I left on the Windows Store:

Spoiler

Probably a great game... but I'll never know

I wish I could rate this game on its own merit. But as it is unavailable outside of the Microsoft Store, my experience with the game as a whole must be included in my review.

Microsoft seems to not understand how abysmal its store is or why 60 GB games should not be UWP app. Three times now I've been forced to download the full 60 GB app because I temporarily unplugged the portable HDD where my game is installed. The files are there (as indicated by the 60GB of space being used), but instead of trying to verify the files or offering to repair the installation- NOPE, download all 60 GB again... and again... and again.

I'll tell you one thing I won't be doing again: buying another game from the Microsoft Store.

Oh yeah, the actual Horizon 3 game is probably fun... but I wouldn't know. I've only spent about 20 minutes playing. But I've spent hours downloading it multiple times.

UPDATE: Now it refuses to recognize my hard drive at all. Can't repair. Can't uninstall. Can't download.

Sorry for the long, first post. TL;DR version: Having been burnt by my first UWP game, as much as I would love to play FH4, I'll never trust nor buy a Windows App game title again. Thank you for bringing this issue to the fore! And to pre-empt anyone who thinks it might have something to do with my system being incapable, I'm running an i7 7700K / GTX 1080 Ti setup.

 

[kick_out_the_jams]

I like how UWP games seem really lightweight with less jank than Win32 counterparts. Like alt+tabbing out of fullscreen games is often really slow and janky on Windows as D3D resources get reset and have to be restored, etc. And I'm always crossing my fingers that it doesn't crash in the process, but UWP never skips a beat.

In my experience that really varies by game - I don't know about other UWP games but Forza Horizon 4 works weirdly.

"Fullscreen" is borderless fullscreen and there is no true fullscreen option, and alt+tabbing out in the introduction cinematics results in some sounds stopping (Music, Character dialogue) while sound from the pre-rendered video would continue to play.

 

[cmaciej]

Steam - Skip the installer, just extract it, discard everything else but "steam.exe", move steam.exe to wherever you want on the disk, run steam.exe. OH, it just works, it downloads "the res"t from the "mother ship" and registers Steam service that's it. Kind of makes a difference, doesn't it?