Microsoft's Game Mode Arrives January 26, Here's How It Works

[heirdeux]

Microsoft's upcoming preview build will include a feature that will increase your computer's performance while you play games.

Microsoft's Game Mode Arrives January 26, Here's How It Works : Read more

 

[anbello262]

Finally a "Game Mode" that (apparently) actually helps, instead of making everything worse.

Won't have much of an impact on powerful cpus, but will probably be helpful on slower PCs filled with running programs and processes.

 

[dstarr3]

And here I was hoping Game Mode was their code name for Project: Shut Down the Windows Store and Just Move All the Games to Steam. Oh well.

 

[Guest]

This is useless. At the end if you want performance get better CPU / GPU and possibly load game from M.2 drive.

 

[Realist9]

This is why M$ is doing this: "Gamill mentioned that you’ll get slightly better performance on UWP games (games purchased through the Windows Store) that use Game Mode as opposed to the Win32 titles."

There is NO reason why it should matter WHERE you bought the game...other than money grubbing. Typical M$.

 

[clonazepam]

All of this "game mode" talk has me feeling a bit nostalgic for Windows XP, and setting up a separate Hardware Profile to boot into that doing away with all unnecessary services and hardware devices. I want to believe it made a difference back in the day.

"UWP" games do not equal games purchased through the Windows Store. That might be the only place to get one currently though. If its beneficial, and the future, then it stands to reason to put the most effort there. Older games will inevitably run much better on up to date hardware anyway.

I feel like the inconsistency and quality issues between a win32 and UWP version of the very same game might make this difficult to test. Would 4 versions of "Rise of the Tomb Raider" (win32 dx11, win32 dx12, uwp dx11, uwp dx12) benchmarked even produce usable results?

Looking forward to seeing the benchmarks.

 

[why_wolf]

Has nothing to do with where its purchased. UWP has stricter rules on how the programs run, thus making it easier to improve efficiency across all of them. As opposed to win32 which has practically no rules and can run in bizarre and unexpected ways that make it difficult to improve runtime efficiency across the board.

That all said improvements are low 2-5% so this really only benefits people on low end hardware and laptops who are desperate for any improvement. Especially a free improvement.

 

[anbello262]

This is useless. At the end if you want performance get better CPU / GPU and possibly load game from M.2 drive.

And then, we complain about bad game optimization.
It might not be much, but this is a company that is actively optimizing its OS for games. For free◘. Software optimization is as important as hardware power.


Also, the way I understand it, average FPS wouldn't be affected very much. The main difference would be in MIN FPS, and less stutter.

 

[Lee_Ray]

Do you think Game Mode will help non-games as well? Eg., if i turned it on during a LR editing session, would it help?

 

[wifiburger]

Game Mode, yeah right.... stupidest thing ever

 

[anbello262]

Do you think Game Mode will help non-games as well? Eg., if i turned it on during a LR editing session, would it help?

Nice idea, being able to choose which app is given the prooruty treatment. Mostly games are latency sensitive/real time, but there are some other programs/scenarios that could benefit from this.

 

[why_wolf]

Do you think Game Mode will help non-games as well? Eg., if i turned it on during a LR editing session, would it help?

I saw one interview ask that. The answer for now is no. Though Clearly from a technical point they could expand it to some productivity programs.

 

[hixbot]

Jumping into task manager and manually controlling task priorities may offer similar results.

 

[Deleted member 1353997]

I hope Game Mode can also deactivate tap-lock on notebooks.

You know, the feature that makes your mouse pad unresponsive to taps when you're using the keyboard. It's very useful when typing text, but pretty annoying when gaming.

 

[Brian_R170]

From the description, it appears to be completely based around scheduling in the OS. There's definitely a lot of performance to be gained if you can properly schedule threads, especially when there are multiple CPU-cores/CPU-threads available and some of them share resources (e.g. cache and execution units). Managing priority and CPU affinity will go a long way, but it typically requires knowledge about the application's use of the CPU resources and it can get really complicated to do it optimally for any given CPU.

 

[anbello262]

I hope Game Mode can also deactivate tap-lock on notebooks.

You know, the feature that makes your mouse pad unresponsive to taps when you're using the keyboard. It's very useful when typing text, but pretty annoying when gaming.

I had never heard about that feature. Is it a win8/10 feature?

 

[Deleted member 1353997]

I hope Game Mode can also deactivate tap-lock on notebooks.

You know, the feature that makes your mouse pad unresponsive to taps when you're using the keyboard. It's very useful when typing text, but pretty annoying when gaming.

I had never heard about that feature. Is it a win8/10 feature?

It's been included in Windows 10 (possibly even 8). Before that, it was a Synaptics feature.

 

[Guest]

I did a lot of testing and comparing Windows 7 and Windows 10 and noticed that Windows 10 is no better optimized than Windows 7 when it comes to CPU with more than 4 cores. An actual processors this was tested against was Xeon 14/28@3.0Ghz and i7 5930k@4.4Ghz. You know MS. was promising a lot with DX12 and we haven't seen any performance improvement with with compared to DX11, in fact in many instances DX12 mode was slower. In limited number of games it did help AMD cards but again AMD DX11 drivers are suck to begin with (No hard feelings here because it is true). My feeling is that since DX12 fiasco caught up with Microsoft they came up with this rather useless gaming mode as part of their rather useless xbox app to keep people interested in Windows 10 which is a failing product for all the reasons it was created for. Game mode is all about making priority which you could always do but it wasn't elegant like MS solution with one checkbox. At the end multicore system won't see any benefit from it in fact it can be counter productive especially with the games where developers spent a lot of time on game engine by doing multithreaded optimisation. Windows 10 + Gaming Mode is also Windows 7 + No bloatware, you could put it that way. It is crazy knowing what amount telemetry crap Windows 10 is taxing CPU with and not only that. If MS wanted to something like this, they are late for about 10 years when we all had dual core CPUs. This is rather pathetic. You can dislike as much as you can my post, really don't care and you know i am right.

 

[rgd1101]

Does it block windows update while gaming?
So bascailly it can work with any apps too, not just games?

 

[alextheblue]

Does it block windows update while gaming?
So bascailly it can work with any apps too, not just games?

Only something that is truly real-time, and is highly sensitive to even the briefest interruptions will benefit. I can't think of any examples offhand outside of games where background tasks, thread contention, or thread hopping would be an issue. Also, this isn't intended to be a boon to peak or average framerate. It's mostly about reducing hiccups for systems that are overburdened - helping reduce the severity and/or frequency of brief performance dips. I suspect you'll mostly see benefits on processors with 2 cores or modules and 2/4 threads, or older quadcores with low per-core performance.

Now, let's get back to complaining about how MS is trying to do something good for gamers on a budget, for free. How dare they.

 

[croc]

And I was hoping for some genius workaround to win 8 / 10's strict limitation of DirectX 9.0c to 4GB total memory usage. I mean, how does that even work? My GPU alone has 6GB VRAM, my PC has another 64GB RAM and I am limited to 4GB by the OS? In Win 7 I can use up to 32xxx GB total ram. Geesh...

 

[hannibal]

That is because 32bit has it limitations. You can not automatically turn 32bit program to 64 bit program. It requires reprograming.
All in all somewhat usefull feature in some cases. And when comparing DX11 and DX12 most people don't even seems to understand how they are different... Ofcource DX11 can be faster! Maybe it does less than DX12 version (worse quality, less details, different shadows) or there just is more or less optimations to another version.
DX9 was a long time faster than DX10. That does not mean that DX9 was better. They just are different and offer different options to do rendering and other GPU tasks.

 

[wifiburger]

this to me is a perfect example of how not do things, obviously people demand an OS for gamming, microsoft take a general poor performing OS like Windows and tries to lies to us with 'game mode'

 

[bak0n]

I dual boot win 7 and win 10. I almost never use win 10 as I don't want to see a slideshow on basic games. Plus I don't have any DX12 games so no real benefit either.

 

[junkyardfrog]

I was hoping it was a total strip of the windows interface and unneeded services. Just the kernel and a minimal game launcher with a control panel for networking, graphics and attached devices.