Windows Game Mode Performance Preview - The Early Numbers are not Good...

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

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As we reported last week Windows 10's new "Game Mode" is supposed to give you a free boost of a few percent in games. Well, early tests of the feature in the Windows Insider preview are looking to be a bit of a disappointment. In PCGamesN's tests, performance actually appears to be lower rather than higher with Game Mode enabled in most benchmarks. Hopefully this is just due to the early nature of the preview builds.

The way Microsoft intends Game Mode to work is by prioritising hardware resources (processor and graphics silicon) for a particular game when you’ve got it running in the foreground, minimising your PC's call on your hardware for background processes.
 
They know it has no benefit at all but they released it anyway. What does that tell you?

Might as well download more RAM while they're at it.
 
Jim Kim said:
And I'm colorblindish so it looks like one orange stripe mixed with 3 almost identical bluegrey strips. Yikes
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That is something I would have missed as well. There should be some big reminder when doing anything color coded helping you pick colors that are significantly different from eachother in order to not exclude those with typical forms of color blindness.

Or maybe even structure the graphs so that the titles are lined up with the bars, so that even if color coding doesn't work out you can still figure them out.
 
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I'm curious if the tests of this mode have been done with other apps running? Lets say there is facebook, skype, and twitter <insert all the crap people might run in the background> all running and THEN we enable this gaming mode. Is there a difference in framerate between having the mode turned on and off?

Hopefully that makes sense.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
That is something I would have missed as well. There should be some big reminder when doing anything color coded helping you pick colors that are significantly different from eachother in order to not exclude those with typical forms of color blindness.

Or maybe even structure the graphs so that the titles are lined up with the bars, so that even if color coding doesn't work out you can still figure them out.
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I'm not even colorblind and that graph messes with my eyes. The color choices are horrendous.
 
Because this is a few days old I'm going to assume that he was using build 15019 since he never stated what he was using. That version had several problems where several people were reporting that games like Overwatch and even Solitare wasn't working. Once again someone getting upset about something that's still is subject to change.
 
Alfred The Grey said:
I'm curious if the tests of this mode have been done with other apps running? Lets say there is facebook, skype, and twitter <insert all the crap people might run in the background> all running and THEN we enable this gaming mode. Is there a difference in framerate between having the mode turned on and off?

Hopefully that makes sense.
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That makes perfect sense. If it improves performance under these circumstances that is certainly helpful, as then we can all be lazy and leave all of our background tasks running.

If this is the case, you could still just shut down all of your other programs before launching the game, so it's not quite as valuable as a mode that speeds things up in ways you don't ahve any other way of accomplishing though.
 
I have tried the game mode for a few things and honestly cant see much of a difference in most. forza apex seemed to run smoother for me, less skips and stutters in the places I normally get them. I have it on for my SW:battlefront and it too seems smoother. fps doesn't seem to have changed for anything I tested, it was all within margin of error for me. I do think its too early to really start raggin on it though as its only been available for two insider preview version, the last and the current 15025. come to think of it I only tested with the last and so did that site as 15025 came on wed night, they never mention version#....

oh and I'm not sure if you've seen the update to the article but they had the dvr recording on their first test sessions. so no shit performance went down... they have turned it off and retested.

Alfred, that does make sense. if they are running it on a new clean build with northing else installed there could be very little difference but on an system that's been in use for a while and is loaded with programs and background apps there maybe a better improvement.
 
Ryokurin said:
Because this is a few days old I'm going to assume that he was using build 15019 since he never stated what he was using. That version had several problems where several people were reporting that games like Overwatch and even Solitare wasn't working. Once again someone getting upset about something that's still is subject to change.
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Original article was posted yesterday. I saw it then, but didn't like it. Not enough interesting testing. It was updated with more testing results today. You are right, he does not state which build he used, which is unfortunate.

I can't speak for the author, but calling him upset seems like it might be a stretch. He is doing what any reviewer tries to do, test and report what he finds for the benefit of his reader. At least that's what I hope they try to do :p
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
That makes perfect sense. If it improves performance under these circumstances that is certainly helpful, as then we can all be lazy and leave all of our background tasks running.

If this is the case, you could still just shut down all of your other programs before launching the game, so it's not quite as valuable as a mode that speeds things up in ways you don't ahve any other way of accomplishing though.
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Thanks. I assume we are not the target audience for this mode. The greater audience would be my brother in law that doesn't know any better and has bloatware running and several other apps running. I've asked him why he doesn't use the PC for gaming and his answer is that his PC is to slow and choppy. (I shake my head knowing I could turn that around in less than 30 minutes...)

Once Microsoft makes this gaming mode part of the normal operation and IF it actually solves that particular problem... you might get people like my brother-in law back to PC gaming.

I'm guessing that this is also an effort to get people away from consoles like the PS4.
 
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Alfred The Grey said:
Thanks. I assume we are not the target audience for this mode. The greater audience would be my brother in law that has all of his programs running and has a slow PC and because of that - does his gaming on an console.
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Yeah, I don't understand this and I see it all the time. Has 20-30 programs running in background (including Chrome with 40 tabs), wonders why games run slow and/or crash frequently.

When I play a game on my PC the game is the only thing running.
 
Armenius said:
Yeah, I don't understand this and I see it all the time. Has 20-30 programs running in background (including Chrome with 40 tabs), wonders why games run slow and/or crash frequently.

When I play a game on my PC the game is the only thing running.
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You need to download more RAM.

If a program is sitting idle in the background, it should not be using any CPU resources or messing with other programs. The only thing that should affect anything is the amount of RAM it is using.

That being said, I generally have nothing else running in the background unless I have a browser open with a bunch of tabs that I don't want to close.
 
Submarinesailor said:
On the positive side, it appears Microsoft is trying to make the OS better for gamers. That's a good thing, right?
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Oh yes. Because appearances - not benchmarks - are all that matter in the end. Right? By that metric then they were trying to make things "better for gamers" with GFWL too. They care so very deeply.

In reality they could make life a whole lot better for gamers if they simply acknowledged the elephant in the room and let us disable telemetry uploads, turn off Cortana (not lurk in the background after "disabling" like it does now), and let us turn off forced driver updates so our GPU drivers aren't overwritten with an older version.

DS6ApC4.png
 
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Let me guess, they enabled that ridiculous system hogging XBox Game Sharing DVR software by default didn't they? IIRC, they turned it on by default for that Anniversary update also, then of course never told anyone about it so it took weeks before people figured it out and spread the news about disabling it.
 
cyclone3d said:
You need to download more RAM.

If a program is sitting idle in the background, it should not be using any CPU resources or messing with other programs. The only thing that should affect anything is the amount of RAM it is using.

That being said, I generally have nothing else running in the background unless I have a browser open with a bunch of tabs that I don't want to close.
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That is of course the real problem. Take my wife for example, until I changed her habits she used her browser tabs as her bookmarks. I checked and the amount of memory consumed was nuts. I think she had around 100 tabs at the time. She would complain about games stuttering for a period of time. Ah yeah I can sure see why. Swapping to the page file is a bitch.

Not sure how this game mode can really solve that. Those people who are using movie-maker in the background and trying to run a game, perhaps gamemode might help?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
That is something I would have missed as well. There should be some big reminder when doing anything color coded helping you pick colors that are significantly different from eachother in order to not exclude those with typical forms of color blindness.

Or maybe even structure the graphs so that the titles are lined up with the bars, so that even if color coding doesn't work out you can still figure them out.
Click to expand...

Depending on the graphing software, you can make the lines have different characteristics (dashed, dotted, etc). In school, I always printed the graph in grayscale. If you could still understand it, it's good.
 
Try making a solid OS instead ... these special cased OS scheduling decisions generally are never a good idea, ask Linux kernel. Basically it's a bunch of extra code that winds up hurting and helping (a wash) so no overall gain and the code is more messy in the end, plus some cornercase breakage, etc. Sounds like the marketing dept is in charge again.
 
How would something like this make any sense ?

I suppose if you are complete idiot and forget you are encoding a big video when you start to game, it could cut that off.

But when I shut down my obvious active programs, my CPU averages less than 1% usage, and that is on an Ancient C2Q. More powerful modern CPUs likely average much less 1%.

If you are already using less than 1% background, there doesn't seem to be any way to gain even 1%.
 
How hard is it to tell Windows to fuck off and do nothing behind the scenes when moderate to heavy GPU use is detected? Thats all we're wanting. Microsoft just can't do anything right these days.
 
Mozgus said:
How hard is it to tell Windows to fuck off and do nothing behind the scenes when moderate to heavy GPU use is detected? Thats all we're wanting. Microsoft just can't do anything right these days.
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It would seem to me like just identifying and giving higher priority to all game related threads would go a long way towards accomplishing this.

You'd still wind up with background processes consuming RAM though.

Either way, it's seeming more and more like this "Game Mode" will primarily be a boon to low end systems.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
Let me guess, they enabled that ridiculous system hogging XBox Game Sharing DVR software by default didn't they? IIRC, they turned it on by default for that Anniversary update also, then of course never told anyone about it so it took weeks before people figured it out and spread the news about disabling it.
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no its not on by default. not for me anyways. before you had to tell every game to run in game mode. now there seems to be a universal switch but it doesn't seem to do anything yet as I still have to enable it per game. some games(for me) run better, some the same and some worse. forza horizon and gr: wildlands take a big hit loosing 5+fps
 
pendragon1 said:
no its not on by default. not for me anyways. before you had to tell every game to run in game mode. now there seems to be a universal switch but it doesn't seem to do anything yet as I still have to enable it per game. some games(for me) run better, some the same and some worse. forza horizon and gr: wildlands take a big hit loosing 5+fps
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I think you misread what I typed. I was stating they likely enabled the XBox DVR system when you enable "Game Mode". That would lead to performance drops since the Xbox DVR does use up some resources and can be problematic on some system setups.
 
ah yes I did misunderstand but its separated so you can have the dvr on but no game mode or the opposite or both. by default both are off, at least on my system its like that.
 
DPI said:
Oh yes. Because appearances - not benchmarks - are all that matter in the end. Right? By that metric then they were trying to make things "better for gamers" with GFWL too. They care so very deeply.

In reality they could make life a whole lot better for gamers if they simply acknowledged the elephant in the room and let us disable telemetry uploads, turn off Cortana (not lurk in the background after "disabling" like it does now), and let us turn off forced driver updates so our GPU drivers aren't overwritten with an older version.

DS6ApC4.png
Click to expand...

Oh the satisfaction one could get simply by clicking that option, it could almost be used as a form of stress relief! :D
 
Armenius said:
Yeah, I don't understand this and I see it all the time. Has 20-30 programs running in background (including Chrome with 40 tabs), wonders why games run slow and/or crash frequently.

When I play a game on my PC the game is the only thing running.
Click to expand...
I leave chrome running in the background all the time when I game with no problems and my computers 6 years old!
 
cyclone3d said:
You need to download more RAM.

If a program is sitting idle in the background, it should not be using any CPU resources or messing with other programs. The only thing that should affect anything is the amount of RAM it is using.

That being said, I generally have nothing else running in the background unless I have a browser open with a bunch of tabs that I don't want to close.
Click to expand...

That is of course the real problem. Take my wife for example, until I changed her habits she used her browser tabs as her bookmarks. I checked and the amount of memory consumed was nuts. I think she had around 100 tabs at the time. She would complain about games stuttering for a period of time. Ah yeah I can sure see why. Swapping to the page file is a bitch.

Not sure how this game mode can really solve that. Those people who are using movie-maker in the background and trying to run a game, perhaps gamemode might help?
DocSavage said:
I leave chrome running in the background all the time when I game with no problems and my computers 6 years old!
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I think you are missing the point.
 
I wonder how many RAM issues folks are getting are mainly from them forgetting they have RAPID mode switched on for their Samsung SSD.

Get that 2GB+ back...
 
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