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[watership]

Is this really all thats going on? Doesn't sound any different then when we used to do things like set core affinity/core parking.

Most of the time you don't need it and it just makes things worse for a normal user.

The for casual users, who don't know what is running in the background that could cause issues, it probably matters more. For anyone who gets odd behavior and can ctrl-shift-esc into task manager to find out "WTF is going on", it wouldn't help as much as you are probably already helping yourself.

I doubt this is a one and done for this feature, I'm sure it'll be improved as time goes on.

 

[Durante]

As I said before when the feature was revealed, I can't rule out that there might actually be some tangible advantages -- but if there are then I would assume them to be mostly relevant on PCs which are misconfigured.

So personally I don't expect anything from it (and I'm still on Windows 10 pre-anniversary anyway).

 

[tuxfool]

Agreed. Since game mode is apparently to reduce frame rate drops, it seems odd not to focus on, or at least give equal attention to, that aspect for the analysis. With the write up as-is you'll get responses like this

OP has linked articles where they show this. Still not a lot of universal benefits there. It remains decidedly mixed.

 

[mcrommert]

As I said before when the feature was revealed, I can't rule out that there might actually be some tangible advantages -- but if there are then I would assume them to be mostly relevant on PCs which are misconfigured.

So personally I don't expect anything from it (and I'm still on Windows 10 pre-anniversary anyway).

Yep looks like it is useful to people who are background in apps and don't close things... So more casual players on lower end hardware

So most of the people playing Minecraft win 10

 

[Swarna]

Something tangible: game mode seems to allow your game to fully override the desktop v-sync settings in Windows 10. I can now get tearing in Overwatch with v-sync turned off. Really been missing this ability since Windows 7. This is a pretty big convenience for competitive players.

Edit: Actually seems like the update just allows for this, anyways, game mode or not.

 

[tuxfool]

Yep looks like it is useful to people who are background in apps and don't close things... So more casual players on lower end hardware

So most of the people playing Minecraft win 10

The kinds of players that don't give a shit about frame times.

Again what kinds of apps are these people going to be running such that it would steal CPU time from their game?

Something tangible: game mode seems to allow your game to fully override the desktop v-sync settings in Windows 10. I can now get tearing in Overwatch with v-sync turned off. Really been missing this ability since Windows 7. This is a pretty big convenience for competitive players.

One shouldn't need game mode to use this feature.

 

[Inbachi]

Huh, disappointing. I was hoping it might help me get a few more frames out of my old ass system but I guess not. Thanks a lot for the write-up!

 

[Paragon]

I mean, it's not necessarily stealing cores from your games.
If you have a high core-count CPU, many games don't use all of them and will benefit more from having exclusive high-priority access to 3/4 of your CPU, rather than shared normal priority access to the entire CPU.

Here's an example from SOMA, since I was playing that earlier today.
The game places the majority of its load on two threads - one main thread and one supplementary.

• Game Mode off. The first CPU core, where the game's main thread is running, is sharing resources and is at 94% load.
• Game Mode on. The first four CPUs are dedicated to non-game tasks and the other twelve give priority to the game. The core that the game's main thread is running on drops to 78%.

Having 22% headroom with game mode on vs only 6% with game mode disabled seems like it could matter.

And I don't have much open in the background there, just Steam, Afterburner, and a couple of minimized browser windows. (Edge)
The resources being used by them are less than 2% of the CPU's total capability - but because they were sharing a core with the game, they were close to potentially affecting gameplay.


I can see 2c/4t CPUs greatly benefitting from Game Mode if they give 3 threads to a game and reserve 1 thread for non-game processes.

Quad-cores probably have the most to lose here, since you're giving up an entire core whether it has simultaneous multithreading or not.
It's really going to be game dependent whether or not it is beneficial to use Game Mode with them.
In most new games I would think not, assuming that you don't have anything running the background which is using a lot of resources.


I do wish that Game Mode was a bit more configurable though.
On an 8c/16t CPU, I'm not sure that it's necessary to reserve a full 2c/4t for non-game processes.

I'd prefer that enabling Game Mode would give you an option to set the split for each application.
In well multithreaded games that can use 8c/16t, there's a good chance that sacrificing 2c/4t would hurt performance more than it would help, but it may be beneficial to set aside 1c/2t instead.
For older games that don't use as many resources, I might prefer to set the split to 4c/8t for each to keep the game on one CCX.

 

[sangreal]

Who exactly is ever going to be running some CPU heavy task in the background, while playing a game?



No. It's rubbish, don't use it, stick with shadowplay.

As a casual PC gamer, I play games while multi-tasking all the time. It's what Windows is made for, after all

I would never bother with closing everything else or setting processor affinity just to play a game

 

[tuxfool]

As a casual PC gamer, I play games while multi-tasking all the time. It's what Windows is made for, after all

I would never bother with closing everything else or setting processor affinity just to play a game

The thing is that windows already has a concept of foreground and background apps and it will schedule appropriately. So unless you have something pummelling your CPU it won't make much of a difference.

 

[SomTervo]

This may actually be useful for people streaming gameplay (Twitch, etc.).

For example, OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is a huge CPU drain in the background and most professional streamers opt to use 2 separate machines because of that - 1 machine dedicated to streaming, the other for running the game on).

It would be nice to see if this comes close to solving that problem at all.

This is a good call.

Also maybe if it's a cpu intensive game like Dwarf Fortress it could be helpful.

 

[Ploid 3.0]

I'm on "Windows 10 Creators Update Privacy Settings for x64-based Systems (KB4013214)" last update was today.

I don't see the Gaming setting in the Setting menu. I remember disabling game DVR in the xbox app a while ago, and I uninstalled the app. Reinstalled it and it was still disabled. Could that be why?

Edit: Doing a manual update via the assistant exe.

 

[Swarna]

Okay, this isn't scientific at all but I've done windowed g-sync in the past with youtube videos and other browser tabs open playing on a second monitor and Overwatch would (VERY infrequently) hitch. It was bad enough that I really couldn't use windowed mode for ladder mode. I've had 2 full sessions now with game mode and borderless Overwatch and it's never skipped a beat. The jank I would feel with windowed mode normally is gone. Could be completely anecdotal/placebo, but I'd like to see how FPS minimums are affected in a game like that on i7 7700k under the same conditions.

 

[ss_lemonade]

I wonder if the latest update will help in any way with the problem nvidia optimus laptops have had for years now (diagonal tearing on windowed mode). I believe Microsoft was supposed to release an update that fixes that issue because it was a problem on their end

 

[Scotch]

Thx for the repsonses. Pretty strange translation decision to make "settings" basically the new control panel (old one is of course still there), yet maintain the same german name for it!

They removed Control Panel from the right-click-Start-menu. You can still open Control Panel by searching for it, but the effort of Microsoft to hide it is damn annoying, because there all still plenty of settings that can only be set in Control Panel. The inconsistency between the new Settings app and the old Control Panel is probably my biggest pet peeve with Windows 10.

 

[LCGeek]

No DPC numbers to make your evidence even more damning, but in general I've been doubtful of this helping/resolving the problem it's made. If MS dislikes bloat maybe they should fix it considering that would do more for gamers and anyone using windows than a tool like this.

I'm not against the tool but considering the solution it employs they completely ignored the elephant in the room and did things that don't help out too much. I say that using a 3570k and 4690k.

So apparently based on your numbers von dach tweaks for priority and debloating do more than game mode, quite pathetic MS. Reserving power or cores doesn't help when the kernel in general is horrible at resource management.

 

[rezn0r]

I wasn't expecting much but glad to know a few more details on it. Thanks for your effort OP & those posting links to other articles too.

They removed Control Panel from the right-click-Start-menu. You can still open Control Panel by searching for it, but the effort of Microsoft to hide it is damn annoying, because there all still plenty of settings that can only be set in Control Panel. The inconsistency between the new Settings app and the old Control Panel is probably my biggest pet peeve with Windows 10.

Exactly this, you nailed it

 

[Ploid 3.0]

Just tried it with D3 which I've been playing lately and now I notice a hiccup every now and then. Maybe because I had record that running in the background at the start (though I disabled it). I'll continue to mess with it with my favorite games. i5-7500.

They removed Control Panel from the right-click-Start-menu. You can still open Control Panel by searching for it, but the effort of Microsoft to hide it is damn annoying, because there all still plenty of settings that can only be set in Control Panel. The inconsistency between the new Settings app and the old Control Panel is probably my biggest pet peeve with Windows 10.

Good to know, I use it often, pinned to start now.

 

[Paragon]

I set up a different test this time: assigning the affinity of a game to a single CPU core, and monitoring the CPU usage while there was a decent amount of CPU load from background applications.
When the game is the foreground application, it completely clears out 3/4 of the CPU - it is totally dedicated to the game process even if it's not all being used.

As soon as you switch away from the game so that it's no longer the foreground application, other processes have access to the whole CPU again.

That seems very effective and convenient to me.
Obviously you would not force games to run on a single thread like this though; that was only to get a better idea of how Game Mode behaved.

I also noticed that any process which has an assigned affinity will not be changed by Game Mode.
When I ran the AIDA64 stress test which loads up all cores to 100%, Game Mode was not able to move everything off the cores.
I don't know if there's a threshold of CPU usage from other processes that automatically disables Game Mode, or if it's something specific to how AIDA64 sets up the stress test. Perhaps higher process priorities will override it.

As I said previously, I'd really prefer to have some level of control over Game Mode to set the balance between system/game resources.
For some games I would prefer to assign 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 to the background processes.
I suppose the goal is to keep it simple though, and that level of control would mainly be useful if you have more than 4 CPU cores - which is not common yet.

 

[dr_rus]

So I have no idea what game mode does or is supposed to do, but I feel like it is a stretch to say the other threads (past two) have gone up in usage in a statistically significant manner. They look the same to me. If they are increased, does the increase in usage on the other threads just negate the decreased usage on the first two threads?

Well, yes, the other 10 threads are doing whatever work was done by the first 2 now. The increase isn't big due to 2->10 re-distribution so it's not very noticeable but here's why I think that using Game Mode on a 4C/4T CPU can be an issue if it's already running at high load across all 4 cores in some game. Would be interesting to test this, maybe I will during the weekend.

Thanks, excellent write-up.

I installed the Creators Update this morning and just noticed that Game Mode was turned on by default, so I have turned it off. I have a habit of closing most other applications when I'm gaming so I don't think this is for me.

It is turned on by default in Settings/Gaming, yes, but this setting by itself doesn't seem to be doing anything. If you check the Game Mode state in Game bar with it being enabled in Settings you'll see that it's actually disabled - and I haven't found a game where it was enabled for me.

Something tangible: game mode seems to allow your game to fully override the desktop v-sync settings in Windows 10. I can now get tearing in Overwatch with v-sync turned off. Really been missing this ability since Windows 7. This is a pretty big convenience for competitive players.

Edit: Actually seems like the update just allows for this, anyways, game mode or not.

There seem to be a new "hidden" feature in Creators Update which makes some DX11 games to behave like all DX9 and DX12 games do - these "some DX11 games" are coincidentally the games which are compatible with Game bar in fullscreen mode now. It seems that MS is forcing such DX11 games into some form of exclusive fullscreen emulation now, which is basically similar to borderless windowed but without the forced vsync with triple buffering.

This feature is active as long as you have "Show Game bar when I play full screen games Microsoft has verified" enabled in the Settings/Gaming. If you disable it then these games revert to the old exclusive fullscreen behavior.

This feature can also be disabled for a specific game via it's EXE compatibility tab, by checking the "Disable fullscreen optimizations" checkbox.

It would be great if MS would actually provide us with detailed information on these little changes so that we don't have to find this stuff out via experimenting with it.

 

[Paragon]

There seem to be a new "hidden" feature in Creators Update which makes some DX11 games to behave like all DX9 and DX12 games do - these "some DX11 games" are coincidentally the games which are compatible with Game bar in fullscreen mode now. It seems that MS is forcing such DX11 games into some form of exclusive fullscreen emulation now, which is basically similar to borderless windowed but without the forced vsync with triple buffering.
This feature is active as long as you have "Show Game bar when I play full screen games Microsoft has verified" enabled in the Settings/Gaming. If you disable it then these games revert to the old exclusive fullscreen behavior. http://i.picpar.com/Grsc.png
This feature can also be disabled for a specific game via it's EXE compatibility tab, by checking the "Disable fullscreen optimizations" checkbox. http://i.picpar.com/Hrsc.png
It would be great if MS would actually provide us with detailed information on these little changes so that we don't have to find this stuff out via experimenting with it.

They have been working on this for a while now. It's not specific to Game Mode.
Presentation Enhancements in Windows 10: An Early Look

 

[dr_rus]

They have been working on this for a while now. It's not specific to Game Mode.
Presentation Enhancements in Windows 10: An Early Look

I didn't say it is.

 

[Ploid 3.0]

I noticed the need for v-sync in windowed full screen too. Thanks for showing how to fix that, well unless the windows desktop v-sync settings are inefficient.

 

[Spider-Vice]

There seem to be a new "hidden" feature in Creators Update which makes some DX11 games to behave like all DX9 and DX12 games do - these "some DX11 games" are coincidentally the games which are compatible with Game bar in fullscreen mode now. It seems that MS is forcing such DX11 games into some form of exclusive fullscreen emulation now, which is basically similar to borderless windowed but without the forced vsync with triple buffering.

This feature is active as long as you have "Show Game bar when I play full screen games Microsoft has verified" enabled in the Settings/Gaming. If you disable it then these games revert to the old exclusive fullscreen behavior.

Well crap you just saved my life. This feature actually breaks vSync in a few games like GTA V. I appreciate the quick, seamless transition between game and desktop, but I'd like features to work properly.

It's pretty nice how for instance changing certain settings like MSAA didn't even make the screen blink, but it broke vSync in a couple of games I tested.

 

[Xcell Miguel]

Sorry to bump the thread but I just found how effective Game Mode is.

So, I enabled it in Elite Dangerous someday.

Tonight I'm encoding videos, thus MeGUI (and x264.exe) take most of the CPU.

I wanted to play Elite Dangerous at the same time as it needs not too much CPU time, and will only impact the encoding time by a few minutes.

So CPU (5930K, 6C 12T) is at 95-100% usage, once in ED, CPU goes down to 40%, with ED being very smooth.

I pressed Win+G and disabled Game mode in ED, CPU goes back to 100%, not really impacting ED as I'm in the void and x264.exe is set to low priority.

Note that when Game Mode is active in ED, it lowers x264.exe CPU time only if ED has focus.

So to conclude, Game Mode is really effective, even on non-system processes.

Note that it can impact streamers using a single PC, as it could lower streaming softwares' CPU time.

 

[_woLf]

Only Microsoft would introduce a "game mode" to Windows only for it to actually reduce framerate in most cases.

I tried it in FH3 and Overwatch and it lowered my framerate slightly in both.

 

[Hux1ey]

For some reason this update broke DSR in UWP games for me.

I now only have a 1080p option where as before I had 4k too :/

 

[Paragon]

Only Microsoft would introduce a "game mode" to Windows only for it to actually reduce framerate in most cases.
I tried it in FH3 and Overwatch and it lowered my framerate slightly in both.

If you read my posts earlier in this topic explaining how it works, you should understand why it is not always going to improve framerate.
With a quad-core CPU, Game Mode reserves 3 cores for the game and 1 core for background processes.
If your game needs more resources than those 3 cores can provide, and your background processes use less than 1 CPU core in total, it may be beneficial not to use Game Mode.
On the other-hand, if you have a lot running in the background, it will probably help to restrict that to only using 1 CPU core and giving the game exclusive access to 3 cores instead of shared access to 4.
If you are playing an older game like the original Crysis which puts 90% of its CPU load on a single core, enabling Game Mode would be beneficial because it guarantees that Crysis has that CPU core all to itself instead of sharing resources with the rest of the system.

 

[horkrux]

For some reason this update broke DSR in UWP games for me.

I now only have a 1080p option where as before I had 4k too :/

Sure it's only UWP games? Did you enable DSR again? I believe Nvidia CP settings were reset for everyone after the update.

 

[Hux1ey]

Sure it's only UWP games? Did you enable DSR again? I believe Nvidia CP settings were reset for everyone after the update.

Oops it's actually for all I forgot I had gedosato on. And yes it was reset but I went back and changed it to 4x and i'm still limited to 1080p now.

 

[Guymelef]

Linus Tech test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfoJO_eThTY

 

[Majine]

Linus Tech test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfoJO_eThTY

This sure seems like the biggest snakeoil in awhile...

 

[ItIsOkBro]

increase performance by reserving entire threads??? that seems dumb.

 

[nynt9]

Linus Tech test.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfoJO_eThTY

lol what

 

[Nikodemos]

Duelyst ran slightly worse with it on. More stutter, slower loading animated sprites.

 

[Izuna]

That Linus video, lmao

 

[Paragon]

If you are the sort of person that closes every other application on your system before playing a game, and that game can take advantage of all the cores/threads your CPU has available, Game Mode can only hurt performance since it reserves 3/4 of the CPU for the game and 1/4 for background processes.
And that's exactly what you see when someone tries to benchmark Game Mode on a clean system with nothing installed/running but the games.
If you don't have any background processes running, you're going to have 1/4 of a CPU basically sitting idle when you enable Game Mode.

If the game uses fewer cores/threads than your CPU has, enabling Game Mode can help improve performance consistency by ensuring it has exclusive access to those CPU cores.
If you have browser windows, voip clients, media players etc. running in the background while you game, Game Mode may help improve performance by restricting them to 1/4 of your CPU so that they don't interfere with the game.
It all depends how demanding the game is, and how much you have running in the background.

 

[nubbe]

Less latency please

 

[Swarna]

So the system-wide game mode option directly reduces input lag.

The game bar option per-game has no effect on it, though. Probably best to enable game mode in Windows settings to reduce input lag and enable/disable per game via game bar depending on performance for that specific game.

I'm guessing the former improves scheduling priority for game processes in general and the latter additionally applies a one-size-fits-all core distribution pattern for its workload which is hit-or-miss. Definitely confusing for the average user.

 

[chronomac]

If the game uses fewer cores/threads than your CPU has, enabling Game Mode can help improve performance consistency by ensuring it has exclusive access to those CPU cores.

I haven't tried it yet, but could it (theoretically) help performance in Dolphin then?