Microsoft is working on a ‘Game Mode’ for Windows 10

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ir0nw0lf

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I'm tempering my enthusiasm over this until I see some actual testing! *But* it does sound interesting...

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-working-game-mode-windows-10/

Snippet:
Microsoft made a big gaming push with the initial launch of Windows 10. The company initially introduced Game DVR, Game Streaming, and DirectX12. Almost a year later, the company launched the Xbox Play Anywhere program, allowing users to buy a game once and play it on their Xbox One and Windows 10 PC without having to pay extra. The firm is working on bringing a set of improvements for Gaming on Windows 10 with the upcoming Creators Update, but it seems to be working on a very interesting feature for Windows 10 as well.

And that interesting feature is the new “Game Mode”. The Game Mode in Windows 10 was initially spotted in a recently leaked build of Windows 10. The build has a new .dll file called “gamemode”:
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Adding in the relevant bit:
According to Microsoft enthusiast WalkingCat, the Game Mode will apparently adjust the resource allocation in Windows 10 when it’s enabled to prioritize games over other applications and processes.
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Sounds interesting for sure, especially since (even disabled), stuff like Cortana continues to run and take up processes/resources (albeit small).
 
People have been doing this with Windows for years now and there's never been more than like a 1-3% "boost" in performance overall when (and if) it actually works, trimming services, resources, skimming the fat of the OS basically.

Just another marketing gimmick to push Windows 10 onto more unsuspecting folks, I'd say.
 
Hoping this leads to full Xbone game software compatibility for PCs down the road, or a software stack for DIYers to build their own custom XBones for their livingrooms.
 
This was my idea, I've been saying for a long time that Windows needs a minimalist game mode. This might get me to use Win10, we'll see after the reviews are in.
 
Too bad the speculation so far is trash. The twitter user who posted the presence of the file seems to confuse PC hardware with game console hardware, and many sites are going with that as if it's real information.

If someone has that Windows 10 build installed, use Dependency Walker or dumpbin to show the functions it has (or send it to me and I'll analyze it). That will give an idea what its used for. Since MS has not mentioned anything significant like a whole new Windows mode for games, it's unlikely to be that. Why? Once again, MS doesn't just spring features onto unsuspecting developers. A big new feature would already be documented and presented at one of MS's developer conferences long in advance.
 
Sounds like that feature introduced with Vista where you could use USB stick as a speed boost by storing part of the swap file on the USB stick - Never really made a cracker of a difference even when running slow hard drives.
 
BulletDust said:
Sounds like that feature introduced with Vista where you could use USB stick as a speed boost by storing part of the swap file on the USB stick - Never really made a cracker of a difference even when running slow hard drives.
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Ah good ol ReadyBoost. It also made next to no difference if you already had 4GB of RAM or more.
 
Simmonz said:
Ah good ol ReadyBoost. It also made next to no difference if you already had 4GB of RAM or more.
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Ha! That's what it was called!

I remember spending a fortune back then on a 2GB ultra fast USB stick, stuffing it in, enabling Readyboost and....

....Disappointment!
 
Nice to see they're making an effort but I'll believe it when I see it.

It won't fix games that need to be optimized by the game developer. Also, DX12 doesn't appear to be making much or any performance gains on supported games. Maybe it needs more time to mature but it's not looking good.
 
dark_reign said:
Nice to see they're making an effort but I'll believe it when I see it.

It won't fix games that need to be optimized by the game developer. Also, DX12 doesn't appear to be making much or any performance gains on supported games. Maybe it needs more time to mature but it's not looking good.
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There's nothing to really "mature" - DX12 is finished and released. The problem is that with Windows 10 only being around 24-25% of the market, there's little financial incentive for developers and publishers to pour money into optimizing only for DX12 or building games around it, when they can hit Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 by sticking to DX11. Remember Windows 7 still hovers at around 50% of the market and hasn't budged despite the "free 10 upgrade" window that came and went.

And with Windows 10's uptake stalled now, I don't see developers rushing to DX12 any time soon, especially when there's no real leap in graphical fidelity. What for?
 
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DPI said:
There's nothing to really "mature" - DX12 is finished and released. The problem is that with Windows 10 only being around 24-25% of the market, there's little financial incentive for developers and publishers to pour money into optimizing only for DX12 or building games around it, when they can hit Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 by sticking to DX11. Remember Windows 7 still hovers at around 50% of the market and hasn't budged despite the "free 10 upgrade" window that came and went.

And with Windows 10's uptake stalled now, I don't see developers rushing to DX12 any time soon, especially when there's no real leap in graphical fidelity. What for?
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Software and hardware constantly mature. DX 9 was still dominant 18 months after Windows 7 and DX 11, that transition took so years and DX 11 wasn't a magic speed boost either. Also Windows 10 has a much larger presence in gaming than the general desktop, with almost 50% of Steam clients and it should break that this month. Also Windows 8.x and 7 devices are aging out, a significant percentage of Windows 7 devices are 32 bit, Windows 10 32 bit is almost non-existent.
 
I sure hope it disables auto restart for those late night gaming sessions. The YouTube videos are too funny. I think Razer software has done this but if there really was almost like safe mode where its just running game stuff and gpu drivers with dx12 that could get interesting.
 
PliotronX said:
I sure hope it disables auto restart for those late night gaming sessions. The YouTube videos are too funny. I think Razer software has done this but if there really was almost like safe mode where its just running game stuff and gpu drivers with dx12 that could get interesting.
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I imagine it will disable restarts, disable notification area popups, and prioritize the foreground task.
 
DPI said:
ITT: A whole lot of speculation and wishful thinking over someone finding a file called gamemode.dll in a folder in an upcoming build. That's literally it. Nothing has been announced or detailed.
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Hah, maybe gamemode.dll sends bejeweled telemetry back to ms.
 
DPI said:
ITT: A whole lot of speculation and wishful thinking over someone finding a file called gamemode.dll in a folder in an upcoming build. That's literally it. Nothing has been announced or detailed.
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PSA: A whole lot of bashing coming out of the standard folks, it could be something or it could be nothing, we will see. Speculation is fine and we already know where you stand so, there is that. Me, I am all for improvements if this is what it turns out to be. :)
 
Obvious chance to "advterise "my free programs for the same/smiliar effect

Project Mercury
https://hardforum.com/threads/project-mercury-cpu-priority-booster-for-heavy-multitaskers.1858462/
www.techcenter.dk

The problem with these kind of things is that they only work if you have a problem to begin with. (aka background load).
but if you run something li 7-zip in the background and then start a game multiple test over 20 diffrence system has show a 60% recovery of lost FPS due to background load.

aka if you lost 100fps from running with 7-zip in the backgrounds. then you get 60fps back form runing project mercury as well.
but there is 0% gain if you run your games on a "clean" system.


for me it a wondertoy because i do alot of multitasking of CPU heavy stuff.
 
If they are just going to disable some services then nothing to get excited about because you can write your own .bat file to do that and I have done that for gaming but don't bother anymore because don't notice any dif anyway. I have a game called Battle of Britain II and it came with a .bat file for that purpose so I took that and customized it for my own setup. You can then create another .bat file to restart the services and processes too. I still have those files on a backup HDD.
 
Let's give MS some credit. I don't think that game mode is going to simply disable services and give a task higher priority. I think it may serve us gamers well. But who knows. I am also something of an anomaly here. I have a working Windows 10 Pro system with 0 issues so take what I say with a grain of salt.
 
rezerekted said:
Telemetry is an issue so your claim is false.
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Some people say everything in 10 is an issue. The way some describe, all my computers should be constantly crashing, none of may software working, just constant problems with everything. And for me personally that's just not been the case. I have more hardware and software running under Windows 10 than any prior version and while not everything is perfect, everything is pretty and solid. The last real issues I had were with the Surface Book original, those issues got sort out back in March.
 
jarablue said:
Let's give MS some credit. I don't think that game mode is going to simply disable services and give a task higher priority. I think it may serve us gamers well. But who knows. I am also something of an anomaly here. I have a working Windows 10 Pro system with 0 issues so take what I say with a grain of salt.
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It'll probably have nothing to do with performance whatsoever, it'll probably be some form of big picture mode like the one provided by Steam, as I can't see how they're going to squeeze a worthwhile performance improvement out of the OS as even giving games priority equates to stuff all.
 
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If that is what they plan to do (a big picture mode) which I don't see it being the case, then damn, that would be lazy. But I have faith that they will put a bit more work into it than that. I mean how much money are they paying their devs? I'd hope they have the foresight to develop something more than a big picture mode when saying a gamers mode is coming.
 
DX12 doesn't appear to be making much or any performance gains on supported games
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Why would it? Stronger i5/i7 CPUs already don't bottleneck, and thus don't see any real performance benefit. Pentiums/i3's don't have the cores necessary to really benefit from better threading. FX processors benefit the most, but are still crippled due to poor IPC causing the main two threads [Game Engine and Primary Render] to stall the GPU.

Not sure why anyone was expecting the rush to low level to do anything CPU side. The main benefits out of DX12 come in mixed render/compute workloads, which ironically favor NVIDIA a ton [Gameworks/CUDA workloads should run a ton faster then they currently do; PhysX especially shouldn't cripple GPUs anymore].
 
Assuming there's anything to this, it's probably just a minor scheduler change and disabling services. Not much else MSFT could do within the confines of a single .dll.
 
gamerk2 said:
Assuming there's anything to this, it's probably just a minor scheduler change and disabling services. Not much else MSFT could do within the confines of a single .dll.
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Well, it's a single .dll now right? I mean they could push other files to Windows also later? Unless Windows 10 is that broken too. Maybe I am giving them too much credit. I thought about MS doing this back in like 99. Having a gaming shell run that is optimized out the ass for the game.

Maybe it's a case of wishful thinking. Hopefully it'll be at least neat.
 
rezerekted said:
But what you say means little because you are clearly biased.
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There are those that state that they are having tons of issues with Windows 10. And there are those like myself who state that things are working well for them in 10. I've got too much money tied up in hardware to use 10 if I were having nothing but problems. The cost of Windows is practically zero compared to all of the other software and hardware I used constantly.
 
windows 10 has worked fine for me since day one of the insider preview. the only issue that has really bothered me is the coming and going of realtek optical dts 5.1 support. they keep breaking it somehow... :(

ps: I just updated to the 15002 build last night and so far so good....
 
Actually same here for me to. Since 1993 being on Win 3.1 and every single Windows release since then, Win 10 pro 64bit has given me the absolute least amount of work to do.

If he's biased, then can't the same be said for you? There are people who have issues and there are people who don't. And that has been happening since the dawn of software.

25$ for a Win 10 Pro key on here is so freaking worth it, it's not even funny.
 
jarablue said:
25$ for a Win 10 Pro key on here is so freaking worth it, it's not even funny.
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Personally, I see this as definitive evidence that you don't see value in the full retail price of Windows. Furthermore, I think it would be safe to assume that almost all users on [H]OCP buy Windows keys this way and therefore many cannot see value in the full retail price of Windows.
 
BulletDust said:
Personally, I see this as definitive evidence that you don't see value in the full retail price of Windows. Furthermore, I think it would be safe to assume that almost all users on [H]OCP buy Windows keys this way and therefore many cannot see value in the full retail price of Windows.
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I've mentioned this a number of times. Where ever you're getting your numbers for retail pricing on Windows, consumers get Windows with their machines, they don't pay anything near the cost you mention nor do they buy it separately anyway. As for people who buy copies of Windows for gaming machines, the cost of Windows may be nothing more than piss in a can. The Vive and the games I bought with it initially were about $1k USD. When I add up all of the stuff that needs Windows to work, even your retail prices that no one pays is insignificant relative to the cost of everything else.
 
jarablue said:
Let's give MS some credit. I don't think that game mode is going to simply disable services and give a task higher priority. I think it may serve us gamers well. But who knows. I am also something of an anomaly here. I have a working Windows 10 Pro system with 0 issues so take what I say with a grain of salt.
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If you have a windows 10 with 0 issues how do you think a game mode is going to help? if they can tweak windows to performance better. then thats must be a performance issues you have right now. They can't pull magical performance our of a thin air. its has to be coming from somewhere.

Maybe they disable core parking. maybe they have found one way to streamline command to the GPU driver, Who knows. but I'm almost pretty sure it going to be a lot of meh for people already running a proper system and more for people that has a load of programs running in the background. otherwise they are just fixing a performance issues of the OS itself
 
My guess is it's an innovative new launcher for games. It'll go full screen when the system turns on so you don't even have to double click. Then you could use your x-box controller to select what game to launch. They could even call it Full Picture Mode. :D
 
yeah that was my guess too! its prob a full screen mode for the xbox app that disables/shuts down a bunch of background shit to optimize the system for just gaming.
 
heatlesssun said:
I've mentioned this a number of times. Where ever you're getting your numbers for retail pricing on Windows, consumers get Windows with their machines, they don't pay anything near the cost you mention nor do they buy it separately anyway. As for people who buy copies of Windows for gaming machines, the cost of Windows may be nothing more than piss in a can. The Vive and the games I bought with it initially were about $1k USD. When I add up all of the stuff that needs Windows to work, even your retail prices that no one pays is insignificant relative to the cost of everything else.
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I think you're missing the point.

In regards to OEM Windows installs being included with boxed brand name machines there will be a cost involved, it's just bundled into the cost of the machine.

In regards to gamers buying Windows from Kinguin or the [H] forums, the only way you're going to get windows for 80% under retail is if it's bought on a stolen credit card and onsold, as it's blatantly obvious that the retail price of Windows is far higher than $20 - 50.

Therefore, it's a fairly safe assumption that if anyone on these forums doesn't pay the retail price for Windows and chooses to purchase off an obviously dodgy third party than they cannot see value in the full retail price of Windows....

....And I don't blame them, Windows is not worth $150.00.
 
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