Is Game Mode placebo or are there any technical details?

[ybriK]

How does it identify if an .exe is a game or not? Does it use a game database? Does it see if a .exe hooks fullscreen? Does it identify if an API is being used then enable game mode? Personally using it doesn't net my any performance gains. Probably because my PC is quite on high-ish-end, so there's little to no gains?

[DrMacintosh]

Game mode actually makes performance worse. 

[MrMarriarty]

yeah its aimed at the lower end PC, i believe it just priorities your games when there running. 

[Cyracus]

game mode is 110% gimmick, you're better off manually closing out unnecessary programs, you might even get performance gains that way 

[Mira Yurizaki]

29 minutes ago, ybriK said:

How does it identify if an .exe is a game or not? Does it use a game database? Does it see if a .exe hooks fullscreen? Does it identify if an API is being used then enable game mode? Personally using it doesn't net my any performance gains. Probably because my PC is quite on high-ish-end, so there's little to no gains?

The OS probably looks to see if an application is making certain DirectX calls to determine if it's a game.

 

The reason why Game Mode doesn't seem to work on high-end machines is because high-end machines have more than enough processing power to handle the OS and the game. Since the game is likely running at maximum speed anyway (i.e., its only bottleneck really is how fast it can shove out draw calls), freeing up processing resources from the OS doesn't really help.

 

To put it in another way, let's say you have two companies you're hauling stuff from. You have a semi-trailer truck to do the hauling. Both of them can't give you enough stuff to fill the trailer, so asking one company to give you less stuff isn't going to help the other company haul more stuff. But let's say you have something more like a large U-Haul truck that holds less stuff than a semi-trailer. Now both companies can fill, or possibly have more than what you can haul. But if for a period of time one company needs priority, you can take less of the other company's stuff to haul.

 

So the trade off when you turn on Game Mode is that you can potentially get a boost in performance in games at the cost of performance to everything else. But you have to have low-end enough hardware for this to really show itself. I found an article a while back on someone who tested Game Mode with a low-end system: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3187171/windows/tested-windows-10s-game-mode-makes-unplayable-games-playable-sometimes.html

 

The other thing is Game Mode was probably design because of how the Universal Windows Platform framework... works (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/how-game-mode-will-make-games-run-better-on-windows/). UWP isn't as direct to the OS as Win32, the other API apps are normally written with.

 

In the end, it's a good thing that Game Mode doesn't really work. Because if it did work as advertised across the board, it means Windows really does take up too much of the CPU's time.

[GoodBytes]

Game Mode really depends on your system specs, and is really if you have other stuff on the back.

If you tend to close all your programs before starting a game, then Game Mode does nothing.

If you have 20 core CPU, then Game Mode will do nothing.

 

If you have a dual core U series CPU, or old/weak Quad Core CPU and have programs on the back.. it may help.

[D13H4RD]

Game Mode really only works when your system isn’t very powerful. 

 

If your system is already extremely powerful with lots of threads, then Game Mode won’t make a difference, sometimes degrading performance.

 

In those cases, Windows itself should already know where to allocate resources. It’s also a reason why Razer Cortex is frowned upon by some people.

[DistortAMG]

Game mode is a good feature (in theory) especially for people with lower end systems. Microsoft's marketing has been a little bit misleading, and they havent quite got it right just yet. But it is going to improve over time, I am sure. Not only are system recources dedicated and favoured towards any running game. In certain situations, code can be processed without having to go through the normal abstraction layers which naturally take up recourses. But like people have already said, you will only see the benefit of this on lower end systems. Microsoft also have the advantage that they can manipulate parts of the operating system that third party 'boost' software can't access.

 

Love or hate Microsoft and Windows, there is one thing that cannot be argued. That they seriously know what they are doing when it comes to programming software. The Windows NT kernal that powers both Windows and the Xbox, has grown in functunality and features over the years, while reducing the amount of processing power that it needs to run.

 

Windows runs on a million different combinations of hardware, that flexibility comes at the price of performance. They do not have that issue with a console as they know the specs of every single Xbox being sold. So software can be wrote with that in mind, giving extra performance. Game mode is partly about giving the performance benefits of a single spec'd machine, on a Platform that supports millions of combinations, They will never get it down to the level on consoles and they havent got it quite right at the moment. But it will get better. This is a good thing though, as it is going to bring more gamers to PC.

 

Try and run a given game on a PC with the same spec as an Xbox one. The performance will be way lower on the PC than the Xbox, because of the streamlined paths consoles can use.

 

 

 

 

[GoodBytes]

Oh. Forgot to mention. Game Mode really benefits UWP games, more.

When Game Mode is enabled, it allows the trusted UWP made game to run at lower levels, bringing its performance close/same to a Win32 made game.

[Delicieuxz]

3 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Oh. Forgot to mention. Game Mode really benefits UWP games, more.

When Game Mode is enabled, it allows the trusted UWP made game to run at lower levels, bringing its performance close/same to a Win32 made game.

So, Game Mode benefits UWP games by getting them to run almost as fast, or equally fast as non-UWP games. Better to just run non-UWP games in the first place, IMO.