Last year, we set out to make Windows 10 the best Windows ever for gaming. With Game Mode, it’s our goal to now take things a step further to make the gaming experience on Windows even better. Our vision is that Game Mode optimizes your Windows 10 PC for an improvement in overall game performance. This week’s Windows Insider build represents the first step on our journey with Game Mode.
Basically, it prioritises CPU and GPU resources for your game, so you can eek out a bit more performance. I’m not quite sure if there’ll be a benefit for people at the higher end (I don’t think my GTX1070 running at 2560×1440 will benefit much), but for slightly lower specifications it might just give that extra little bit for a more consistent experience.
All in all, I’m happy with these gaming-oriented features in Windows, but I really hate how Microsoft is slapping ‘Xbox’ on everything and tries to take me out of my beloved and trusted Steam environment. It reeks of utter garbageware like Uplay.
At least it’s not called “One Game Mode”
Are they fixing the bug when exiting a game, it goes to black screen if your monitor display adapter is set to 60Mhz? (the solution is to chose 59Mhz).
Interestingly, I have the opposite problem in Windows 10: If I play a game with my monitor set at 59MHz, I get a black screen when exiting. My solution was to set it at 60MHz. Perhaps this is monitor-dependent?
Your monitor’s refresh-rate is in tens of MHz? Well, shieeett, you got some serious hardware, there! The fastest I’ve seen was mere 240Hz!
You’re right of course, it’s Hz, not MHz. My only excuse is I hadn’t had my coffee yet when I wrote that. 🙂
Someone had to poke a little fun at you. And I happen to enjoy being a smartass
(OOPS wrong place)
Edited 2017-01-26 14:35 UTC
I have a fairly beefy system, but even then I was surprised to see that Fallout 4 rides at right around 28-30% CPU usage while I’m playing it (i7-6700k, no overclock with 1080GTX).
Gone are the days when high end games like that can really max out a system’s resources.
Granted, if I try to tweak up super sampling within Elite Dangerous and SteamVR it’ll bring my system to it’s knees still.
Though I tend to think otherwise, this almost seems like a response to SteamOS. “What, they advertise it as taking less system resources so they could be used toward gaming performance!? We should do that! Got to keep one of the last monopolies we have left!”
Fallout 4 has a very old engine, so it is not ideal for benchmarking. I believe some modern AAA games could put some pressure on the CPU, Warhammer Total WAr, maybe? But good CPU is important for more “serious” games like ARMA 3, or the upcoming Mount an Blade. Having hundreds of people on screen with AI can be really taxing even today.
The other game that used only like 30% was Earth Defense Force 4.1, which is fairly new, and you have 100s of enemies on the screen at the same time. Weird thing is, it’d still occasionally dip frame rate.
REALLY looking forward to a new Mount and Blade, wish I had the time to play the original one too. Such a good game.
I’ll have to test Total Warhammer under Linux when I get the chance to see how it handles cpu load.
He could still be CPU bound, even with an older engine. The i7-6700k is still quad-core, so with SMT enabled, that means 8 threads.
If two threads are working hard – say, graphics and physics – and are CPU bound on a 4c/8t system, it’ll only show up as. 25% CPU usage in Windows (One thread maxed out on a 4c/8t system will only display as 12.5%, or 1/8 of max).
Newer engines won’t necessarily be too different.
Most games are aiming to be GPU bound during gameplay, and IO bound during loading, not CPU bound. So it’s possible for a game to really be pushing the envelope while not using 100% of your CPU. 30% of a quad core system or even 6 core system is reasonably impressive for an interactive application that interacts responsively with graphics hardware, like a game.
Hi,
“Game mode” will be followed by “3D CAD mode”, then “web browser mode”, then “spreadsheet mode”, then “wordprocessor mode”, then…
For all of these modes (including “game mode”) if you try to multi-task (on your “multi-tasking for 20+ years now” OS); you will probably be screwed; in the same way that running 2 or more games and switching between them has always been a problem.
– Brendan
Are the Gaming mode for broken and crippled sandboxed app that comes from MS App store only?
Win32 is legacy, get over it.
In a few years it will be drinking beers with Carbon.
Edited 2017-01-26 10:18 UTC
Yet developers are getting frenzy when dealing with posix compliance, go figure.
Which ones? Surely not the ones writing desktop and mobile applications.
Personally, the less I use POSIX, the better.
A fossilized, unsafe API only useful for text mode command line applications and server daemons.
Edited 2017-01-26 13:12 UTC
90% of posix isn’t about being console mode, it’s about dealing with files, and making promises about system calls.
Assuming an hardware that hasn’t changed since the 80’s, very helpful indeed.
First, hardware hasn’t changed since the 80’s. A disk is a disk, a keyboard is a keyboard.
Second, POSIX isn’t tied to hardware. It’s tied to what programmers expect to be able to interact with the system – how files are loaded and accessed, how error messages are generated or processed, how to receive data from other programs, how to open network sockets, how IPC is handled.
That said, the latest posix spec is from… 2008? Little, if anything, has changed w/r to interacting with hardware in the past 8 years. Or, the past 30 years, for that matter.
So what are the POSIX 2008 functions and structures for:
– Mobile hardware
– GPGPU
– GUI
– 2D and 3D graphics
– Bluetooth
– 3D printer
– fingerprint readers
– barcode scanner
– WiFi
– sound cards
– ….
Why would posix have those? Posix is NOT the same as Win32, which is everything and the kitchen sink for desktop and server systems.
Posix is a subset of functionality common to almost all systems running a multi-tasking, multi-user OS. This includes systems that do not have bluetooth (like a server), systems without a graphics card (like a compute node or some servers), systems without barcode scanners (desktop machines, most machines in general), fingerprint readers (almost everything except a certain era of laptop), and GUI (since this is NOT an OS-level feature for most OSes).
Like I said 80’s computers.
You might as well ask where the Direct3D APIs are to deal with controlling barcode scanners.
By design, POSIX is a common core API. It’s intended to cover a common base of functionality, not to be everything to everyone.
Yep, stuck in the world of command line tools and daemons, as I said.
Ok, nobody is that dumb. You’re clearly trolling.
Feel free to have the last word if you want. This is the last message I’ll send you.
Edited 2017-01-27 11:02 UTC
Driver support in posix is nil.
Are you also unhappy that OpenGL doesn’t handle audio playback, and that libcurl can’t open PNG files and convert them to jpeg?
If you were talking about ncurses, I suppose I could understand. But I really don’t see why you are unhappy about an API that is mostly about dealing with files not having things like bluetooth or graphics. There are other APIs that deal with those, such as bluez and OpenGL+X11, and the fact that they are not specified in the same documents as posix seems to be your biggest disappointment.
I am not disappointed at all.
I enjoy modern desktop computing in OSes aren’t stuck on a view of the world as PDP-11 replicas.
“Windows is legacy, get over it”…FTFY.
Vulkan is kicking DX12s behind, Win 10 and its spying is looked upon like plague blankets, and MSFT trying to shoehorn Xbox into Windows is just making its demise come all the quicker.
Frankly if MSFT had a brain (hint: They don’t) they’d hang onto Win32 for dear life because inertia and devs already knowing the API are powerful tools for keeping apps on their platform, without that? Well no reason to be staying on their platform when you can code for Vulkan and have it work on everything.
Everything is very small quantity for the set of hardware and operating systems that actually support Vulkan.
Why are you asking a question that is clearly answered in the article? What’s the point?
Other than the XBox app, SmartScreen, and now the new settings screen what exactly do you consider “everything” that Microsoft is branding as XBox in Windows, Thom? And, boo-f’ing-hoo, your ‘beloved’ Steam. There’s nothing in anything Microsoft is doing that actively prevents you from having your compu-bro-mance with Valve. So why the comment as if you are being actively prevented from enjoying the warm embrace of that application? If you don’t want to enable the new Game Mode, or do anything with the XBox branding that you find oh so horrible, then just ignore it all and continue to use Steam.
Your self-pitty laden commentary at the bottom of the copy-pasted article text is just awful. It’s incredibly hyperbolic and built on the foundation of a poorly considered straw-man. Windows settings and one or two XBox branded apps are not at all comparable to UPlay. I’ll agree that UPlay (and Origin) are sub-par versions of Steam, but neither of them have anything in common with an OS level settings screen. I guess you could argue that Beam makes Win 10 somewhat akin to Stream, but then you’d have to include anything with live broadcasting; Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, Twitch, nVidia, etc… It’s tenuous at best and barely worth writing about in the manner you did.
Edited 2017-01-26 13:24 UTC
Funny, games kept crashing on Windows 10 while bringing the whole system to a freeze.I re-installed 7 and haven’t had an issue since then. Too many under the hood changes and major updates without enough compatibility checking appears to be going on.
I’ve had just about every game freeze on me once, I kill it in the task manager, then it seems to work afterward… weird.
I’ve had this issue as well. At this point, more of the games I want to play work in Wine on Linux and FreeBSD or natively on Linux than do in Windows 10.
you should try clean installing windows 10, getting the ISO from Microsoft website. That helped me out immensely. it cleans up the driver packaging, linking and backup folder for good.
It was always a self built desktop, there is definitely something wrong with the last major update.
It’s “eke out” not “eek out”.
Unless you’re a purple cat.
I’m not saying Them is a purple cat, but I’m also not saying he’s not
Has Thom ever said, “It never hurts to help!”?
English isn’t his native language so it’s understandable he’ll make mistakes. In fact, he makes fewer mistakes than many native speakers.
I’ll bet it actually requires the Xbox app to be installed. I will find this hilarious if it does, because on every single system I’ve seen, forcibly uninstalling the Xbox app (you can actually do this through PowerShell, but you have to do it again every time a new build of 10 comes out) actually improves gaming performance pretty significantly.
There are all kinds of other performance issues they should be addressing first to improve the whole system:
* The default search indexing options are a huge performance drain despite not being used by a majority of users on non-mobile platforms and giving near zero measurable benefit for many uses.
* Background apps should be opt-in on first use, not opt-out.
* Updates shouldn’t arbitrarily start downloading whenever the hell they feel like it (stopping that crap may just be enough to get me to use game mode even if it depends on the Xbox app) without having to lie to the system about your network being metered.
* Third-party apps shouldn’t be getting bundled by default and/or randomly installed without user consent.
* Application requested QoS markings on network traffic should be respected without having to modify registry keys to get it to happen.