Game Mode can boost minimum frame rates, on low-end PCs trying to do stuff

[Mira Yurizaki]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3187171/windows/tested-windows-10s-game-mode-makes-unplayable-games-playable-sometimes.html

 

Basically, Game Mode can bare it's fangs... if you're loading up lower end processors with background tasks. However, since Game Mode limits processing those background tasks, they suffer in performance as well. This may be handy if you're wanting to run games on a laptop with a dual-core i7 and you don't want to close a bunch of things.

 

But ultimately, while Game Mode feels like a nice gesture, it doesn't seem like it was really needed for many people who play games on their PCs.

 

Important bits from the article as follows:

Quote

Yawn. As with the average frame rate, there’s virtually no difference. Game Mode doesn’t make a difference if you aren’t clogging up your computer with multiple programs.

 

But if you are, Game Mode can have significant impact—enough to mean the difference between a playable and unplayable experience, subjectively. Here are the minimum frame rates for the trio of tested games when background processes are running in the background.

 

 

Running the trio of background tasks devastates the minimum frame rate in these games. Gears once again stumbles over itself, with the minimum falling from nearly 50 fps all the way down to 12.5 fps with Game Mode disabled. It’s a nasty 12.5 fps, too, with near-constant stuttering and severe stretches of paused action. Bioshock and Tomb Raider’s minimum frame rates each fell by roughly two-thirds, to under 10 fps. While Bioshock’s result look worse on paper, Tomb Raider actually performed far worse subjectively, plagued by the same colossal lag and stuttering as Gears, with an added bonus of significantly longer load times between benchmarking sections.

 

[WMGroomAK]

14 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3187171/windows/tested-windows-10s-game-mode-makes-unplayable-games-playable-sometimes.html

 

Basically, Game Mode can bare it's fangs... if you're loading up lower end processors with background tasks. However, since Game Mode limits processing those background tasks, they suffer in performance as well. This may be handy if you're wanting to run games on a laptop with a dual-core i7 and you don't want to close a bunch of things.

 

But ultimately, while Game Mode feels like a nice gesture, it doesn't seem like it was really needed for many people who play games on their PCs.

 

Important bits from the article as follows:

 

If I read the article correctly, they were using a Surface Book with an i7, 16 GB of RAM and GTX 965M.  Kind of interesting results... Find it really interesting that the Average FPS on Bioshock and Tomb Raider only dipped about 3 to 4 FPS with background tasks vs Gears, which dipped about 30 FPS on average and Game Modes biggest impact was on Gears on the Average FPS although all of them saw a good bump on the minimums while running Background Tasks.

[captain_to_fire]

Maybe @Slick or @LinusTech can test game mode on a PC with just the built in Intel HD Graphics 630 of an i7-7700k/i5-7600k or the Iris Pro Graphics of the Skull Canyon Nuc. Their testing methodology includes a laptop with discrete GPU, it would be interesting to see how W10 Game Mode will perform on an integrated GPU alone. 

Edited April 14, 2017 by hey_yo_

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

Maybe Luke or Linus can test game mode on a PC with just the built in Intel HD Graphics 630 of an i7-7700k/i5-7600k or the Iris Pro Graphics of the Skull Canyon Nuc. Their testing methodology includes a laptop with discrete GPU, it would be interesting to see how W10 Game Mode will it perform on an integrated GPU alone. 

The used the iGPU on Bioshock Infinite, at least.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

4 hours ago, hey_yo_ said:

Maybe Luke or Linus can test game mode on a PC with just the built in Intel HD Graphics 630 of an i7-7700k/i5-7600k or the Iris Pro Graphics of the Skull Canyon Nuc. Their testing methodology includes a laptop with discrete GPU, it would be interesting to see how W10 Game Mode will it perform on an integrated GPU alone. 

 

I actually would like to see things like this tested on lower-end systems that are very tight on system resources.  For example, test with

• a dual core pre-Ryzen AMD APU (or a Haswell i3-T or older if 4 threads required, maybe a Q6600),
• 2 GB RAM (or maybe 4, but only if a program refuses to run with 2)
• a single spinning IDE HDD for OS, programs and swap (or a < 500GB 5400rpm SATA drive if no IDE port available, whether onboard or via PCI card)

And set the games to use more VRAM than the GPU has.

 

Oh, and on the subject of using swap (since it's required in my example) ... also compare performance on the IDE / slower SATA HDD, vs a SATA SSD and an NVMe SSD.

[zMeul]

I did my own testing, the W10 Game Mode is utter trash

I tested on both an i5 with GTX1070 and an Ivy i3 laptop with a HD86xx

 

the GameMode might benefit UWP games since their process priority is all over the place - I don't have UWP games and I don't plan on owning one

one quick alternative to change process priority (I use Above Normal) for the focused process/window is to install Mz CPU Accelerator: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/CPU-Tweak/Mz-Cpu-Accelerator.shtml

[captain_to_fire]

4 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

 

I actually would like to see things like this tested on lower-end systems that are very tight on system resources.  For example, test with

• a dual core pre-Ryzen AMD APU (or a Haswell i3-T or older if 4 threads required, maybe a Q6600),
• 2 GB RAM (or maybe 4, but only if a program refuses to run with 2)
• a single spinning IDE HDD for OS, programs and swap (or a < 500GB 5400rpm SATA drive if no IDE port available, whether onboard or via PCI card)

And set the games to use more VRAM than the GPU has.

 

Oh, and on the subject of using swap (since it's required in my example) ... also compare performance on the IDE / slower SATA HDD, vs a SATA SSD and an NVMe SSD.

I don't think W10's Game Mode would do any difference on a Q6600 and a slow mechanical hard drive not to mention 2 GB of memory. 

[You_are_a_cunt]

16 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

I don't think W10's Game Mode would do any difference on a Q6600 and a slow mechanical hard drive not to mention 2 GB of memory. 

Might test that thought if I can get my hands on a board for my Q6600 and a GPU. Could also test an ancient dual core w/ 2 gigs of ram and igpu (and a GPU, if I can find one).

Will look into how it affects performance on my netbook (which has a whopping 1.2(?) GHz single core and 3 gigs of ram)

[captain_to_fire]

36 minutes ago, revsilverspine said:

Might test that thought if I can get my hands on a board for my Q6600 and a GPU. Could also test an ancient dual core w/ 2 gigs of ram and igpu (and a GPU, if I can find one).

Will look into how it affects performance on my netbook (which has a whopping 1.2(?) GHz single core and 3 gigs of ram)

Please do 

[WereCat]

My friend that still uses AMD Phenom has a lot less micro-stuttering in GTA V with Game Mode ON.

[You_are_a_cunt]

42 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

Please do 

Can test on netbook next week (leaving for Easter in a few hours and no wifi where I'm going) and I'll see if I can at least get my hands on a GPU to test the dual core system. Board for Q6600 will take longer

[Doobeedoo]

Would be good to see more various system and game test though. But can aid in certain situations so that's good, it's integrated there so.

[silberdrachi]

If only they would just allow us granular control of background tasks to actually make them do what we want to do and only what we want to do. Instead of wasting CPU cycles on stupid shit like popping ads in our taskbar and logging keys.

 

Nah thats too hard for windows users, better make it so they can never turn it off. Its better for the user.

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, silberdrachi said:

If only they would just allow us granular control of background tasks to actually make them do what we want to do and only what we want to do. Instead of wasting CPU cycles on stupid shit like popping ads in our taskbar and logging keys.

 

Nah thats too hard for windows users, better make it so they can never turn it off. Its better for the user.

You never messed with Services, Task Manager, or SecPol before?

[silberdrachi]

Just now, M.Yurizaki said:

You never messed with Services, Task Manager, or SecPol before?

Most of the sarcasm was because windows is either ignoring settings or isn't allowing access to settings to disable a lot of these things. You can minimize background processes if you spend a lot of time tracking it down, but you cant ever disable some of them fully. And just like Microsoft has been doing in some of these major updates, they have been disabling the ability for local policies to affect things they don't want it to, or just routinely re-enabling them without user input.

 

When it comes down to it, there is a hard limit on how much you can disable, or at which level you're able to disable it. And Microsoft is actively interested in removing your ability to continue to disable these features.

[Mira Yurizaki]

9 minutes ago, silberdrachi said:

Most of the sarcasm was because windows is either ignoring settings or isn't allowing access to settings to disable a lot of these things. You can minimize background processes if you spend a lot of time tracking it down, but you cant ever disable some of them fully. And just like Microsoft has been doing in some of these major updates, they have been disabling the ability for local policies to affect things they don't want it to, or just routinely re-enabling them without user input.

 

When it comes down to it, there is a hard limit on how much you can disable, or at which level you're able to disable it. And Microsoft is actively interested in removing your ability to continue to disable these features.

Either way, the point of Game Mode seems lost to me when its effects are only more pronounced in the low end sector, which most PC gamers aren't in. It's the same with Mantle, DX12, and Vulkan.

 

It's like saying unplugging your chargers when nothing is charging them will impact your electric bill when you're blasting your HVAC 24/7

[sof006]

The benefits are better on systems that are worse off, I guess thats a plus! 

[vorticalbox]

5 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Either way, the point of Game Mode seems lost to me when its effects are only more pronounced in the low end sector, which most PC gamers aren't in. It's the same with Mantle, DX12, and Vulkan.

 

It's like saying unplugging your chargers when nothing is charging them will impact your electric bill when you're blasting your HVAC 24/7

how is the point lost? The point of it was to give more cpu cycles which this mode does, just because a "high end rig" doesn't benefit from it does not make it a useless feature. 

 

The same thing happened with ready boost, it helped out a lot of lower end hardware but was basically useless on mid or high rigs. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 minutes ago, vorticalbox said:

how is the point lost? The point of it was to give more cpu cycles which this mode does, just because a "high end rig" doesn't benefit from it does not make it a useless feature. 

 

The same thing happened with ready boost, it helped out a lot of lower end hardware but was basically useless on mid or high rigs. 

Of course it doesn't. But if the target audience is people who want to play AAA games on low-end systems, that strikes me as odd they would implement this feature rather than something that helps a lot more people.  Besides, Gears of War 4 requires a quad-core processor. Granted it ran on a dual-core processor, I would imagine the quad-core processor requirement is just to get it to something "playable" by PC gamer standards.

 

Also if not running any background tasks makes Game Mode less effective, then I could argue why not close those background tasks? Game mode will kill the performance of those background tasks too. So unless you really need an app up that requires the CPU for some reason while you game, go close the applications in question.

 

So no, it's not worthless. It just has little value.

[vorticalbox]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Of course it doesn't. But if the target audience is people who want to play AAA games on low-end systems, that strikes me as odd they would implement this feature rather than something that helps a lot more people.  Besides, Gears of War 4 requires a quad-core processor. Granted it ran on a dual-core processor, I would imagine the quad-core processor requirement is just to get it to something "playable" by PC gamer standards.

 

Also if not running any background tasks makes Game Mode less effective, then I could argue why not close those background tasks? Game mode will kill the performance of those background tasks too. So unless you really need an app up that requires the CPU for some reason while you game, go close the applications in question.

 

So no, it's not worthless. It just has little value.

i suppose but people don't want to have to close things manually, people like a button that will do everything for them.

 

I'm surprised one click program installers aren't a thing.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, vorticalbox said:

i suppose but people don't want to have to close things manually, people like a button that will do everything for them.

 

I'm surprised one click program installers aren't a thing.

There is. I launch Atom's installer, wait a minute, and it installs, launches, and everything.

 

The only problem is I lose the ability to tell it where to install and what to install if I don't want some of the components it comes with.

[vorticalbox]

7 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

There is. I launch Atom's installer, wait a minute, and it installs, launches, and everything.

 

The only problem is I lose the ability to tell it where to install and what to install if I don't want some of the components it comes with.

does it? When I installed atom it definitely asked me a bunch of questions. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Just now, vorticalbox said:

does it? When I installed atom it definitely asked me a bunch of questions. 

I just ran the latest installer. When you launch it, it literally says something to the effect of "Installing Atom. It will launch when it's done" I also believe Chrome is the same way.