Quote:The omniscient and enigmatic WalkingCat (@h0x0d) was first to spot the existence of a 'gamemode.dll' file in Windows 10 build 14997, which leaked earlier this week. According to the nomadic feline, Windows 10's Game Mode "will adjust its resource allocation logic (for CPU/Gfx etc.) to prioritize" the game being played.

To put this in simpler terms, it appears that Game Mode will optimize the entire OS around the game that you're playing. Operations that aren't essential to ensure the best gameplay performance and stability would be 'deprioritized', while more system resources are dedicated to boost the gaming experience.

There's still a great deal that we don't know about this new feature, including when it's expected to become a fully integrated part of the OS. While the Game Mode file is in the latest internal builds, the feature isn't actually working yet, and Microsoft has made no announcements about its plans to enable it.

Quote:Our own sources have said this feature works similarly to how Xbox One handles running a game. Xbox OS, when a game is launched, will allocate resources to make sure the game is running the best it possibly can. Up until now, Windows hasn't had a built-in option for this that benefits games directly, but with the Creators Update that will be changing.

It's unclear if Game Mode will work with all Win32 games from the likes of Steam or Origin (we're assuming it will), or if it'll be limited to games from the Windows Store. Regardless, it's interesting to see Microsoft taking PC gaming seriously again, as for a while they kind of abandoned it in favor of Xbox. Now Microsoft's goal is the merge the two, as they both run on the same platform after all.

Quote:But Brad Chacos decided to test the mode a bit differently. He fired up a number of simultaneous applications, left them running in the background, and then started benchmarking. I recommend reading the full article, but here’s a slide of how much minimum frame rates can improve when you start running background tasks while using Game Mode:

According to Chacos, none of the games became great to play, but all of them were playable, whereas the colossal lag and poor response time otherwise made that impossible. One thing to keep in mind is that other tasks that you’re performing in the background may suffer as a result — YouTube started stuttering when Chacos switched Game Mode on.
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No, Game Mode isn’t going to boost performance on an already-swank desktop PC with minimal background task processing. But it might help your traveling laptop or secondary system score noticeably better frame rates without requiring a lot of tweaking. If you’re trying to game on older hardware but still upgraded to Windows 10, this could be worth checking out.

Quote:The above doesn't cause any problems during routine PC use, but what happens when you start playing a game? On the Core i3 budget build, things went south quickly in most games—not necessarily for the game, but the YouTube video started dropping frames and was clearly compromised, and gaming performance started stuttering a bit as well compared to running lean and clean. On the high-end PC, as you would expect given the hardware, everything continued to run more or less business as usual.
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If that was the whole story, at least I could come away saying Game Mode tends to help a bit with PCs that are struggling to maintain framerates while doing other moderately complex background tasks (like watching a YouTube video). The problem is that there's a second part to what's going on, specifically what happens to the video playback on Youtube.

On the i3-7100 and GTX 1050 Ti, without Game Mode the Youtube video starts to stutter a bit in some games, more severely in CPU intensive games like Ashes: Escalation. It's a workload that's too much for the PC to handle already, but turning on Game Mode takes the video from stuttering to stop-motion playback. The audio didn't drop out, but the video would show a single frame for seconds at a time. In either case, I wouldn't recommend streaming an HD video on a budget system while gaming (unless it's a very lightweight game).
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Of course I've only tested a handful of games, on two hardware configurations. Maybe there's some specific combination of hardware and software that will show greatly improved results with Game Mode. I doubt it, and a better solution is to shut down unneeded background tasks when playing games—at least if your PC doesn't have enough RAM and processor performance to handle things. Upgrading your PC's hardware is another option, but that costs money. And if you're using a PC infested with malware, definitely take care of that problem before thinking about playing games. It's all about priorities.