05-05-2017, 08:48 PM
http://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-game-m...titasking/
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.