Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's New Windows 10 Game Mode Will Maximize Gaming Performance (mspoweruser.com)
Microsoft has started officially testing a new Game Mode feature in Windows 10. From a report: Traces of the new option were found back in December, but the most recent test build of Windows 10 (15007) includes Game Mode in the Xbox app. MSPoweruser has supplied some screenshots of how you can enable the option, but Microsoft has not yet officially unveiled Game Mode for everyone to test. Microsoft's description lists the feature as a mode to let a PC make gaming the "top priority to improve your game's quality." It's still not clear exactly how Game Mode will improve gaming performance, but it's likely that Windows 10 will simply suppress system processes and other apps from taking too many CPU, GPU, and RAM resources away from the primary game being played.
Can we just leave this on 100% of the time?
While gaming, telemetry will stop. Strangely enough this boosts performance.
it's gonna shut down all the spyware and updates and maintenance and other services and shit that are running constantly?
nope?
well then, you aren't really 'maximizing performance'. you're just giving the appearance of doing so. kinda like how hibernate is used to simulate a faster boot time.
It was confirmed a little while back that this 'Game Mode' will only work on MS Storefront games, like Forza Horizon 3, Gears 4, etc. So it's going to be very limited for most PC gamers.
No steam = just about useless. Who wants to use MS store games only?
So the improved gaming performance was a lie and now on to plan 2.
I was just think what is the point? Most new games are released to the various consoles. Seems like you can't hardly buy any of the better games for PC anymore.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It disables screen capture for better GPU performance.
It disables keylogging for less input lag.
It disables file scanning for more drive and CPU performance.
It disables webcam recording for better GPU, drive, and CPU performance.
It disables microphone recording for better drive and CPU performance.
And finally it disables sending all this information back to Microsoft and the NSA for better networking performance...
It does not disable what game you played, what you did in the game, where you "bought" the game from, who you played with, where you wearing pants, how long you played, or any other thing like this from being sent back to Microsoft after you exit game made.
All Hail The Electric Eye!
I suspect that it would have little effect on high-end machines (i7 + high-end graphics cards) because on these machines the above-mentioned tasks are only consume a small part of the overall system bandwidth. It may have a more significant effect on lower- or mid-range machines, especially those with rotating drives, because the delays caused by the various systems functions and other apps will constitute a larger fraction of the overall resources.
Of course, this may have been discussed in TFA that I didn't read.
Nigel Tufnel: The performance numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most OSs go up to ten?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's faster? Is it any faster?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one faster, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your Grand Theft Auto. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One faster..
Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten faster and make ten be the top number and make that a little faster?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.
Game Mode will only work for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) games so it will not benefit any of the games that would really benefit from it.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Really? Your'e just going to drop this bullshit article on here and pretend like it is actual real news?
Pfft - I've been doing this for years, just edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys and boot from floppy. Kids these days!
Sounds like they will check the boxes on more cores for you and possibly not run any schedule tasks like Windows Defender scans other bullshit while you are gaming.
In other words, the same things that gamers are already doing anyway.
Still not enough to stop the exodus once Vulkan starts paying dividends.
I bet it's just SteamOS in a VM...
Every time I read an article about a so and so optimization it seems to me like marketing FUD.
Take for example that Windows was optimized for start up and that it's faster than ever before. This was all the rage a while back but I always found that even though you arrive at the desktop faster you are unable to start any applications for some time which could be as long as minutes. Linux or Mac may seem to take a little longer to load but are often functional a lot quicker on the same hardware.
Is this more smoke and mirrors? Given all the variables involved how do you come to the conclusion that this will be faster for ALL games, not the select few that are run for these tests.
I believe you can get better performance from conscientious game developers than a magic flag that may or not improve performance for a given game.
If I need to tweek my OS for every use then I'll be spending more time tweeking than using.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Best answer ever!
Seriously, stop accepting Microsoft excuses and accepting their constant excuses. Windows 10 FAILED. It's Windows Vista again, but this time they're doubling down instead of cutting their loses on the worse of it and fixing it in the next edition they're just doubling down.
You do know that they did the same with Vista? Right? Windows 7 is just a re-branded version of Windows Vista. In other words, Microsoft did double-down on Vista.
Vista flopped because the PC manufacturers didn't believe Microsoft on the release date so they dragged their asses in the development of Windows drivers for the new driver model. Then when Vista was released, manufacturers were caught with their pants down. People upgrading to Vista ended up with blue-screens or just couldn't get their hardware to work. Of course, everyone blamed Microsoft.
By the time Windows 7 was released, most people had upgraded to new hardware and manufacturers had Vista/Win7 drivers available. So it was a much easier transition.
Too late! Win 10 already broke multimonitor gaming with latest update.
Oh, we got a live one here, a real hater!
Biggest annoyance is when Skype decides to suddenly remove focus from the game window, fucking everything up.
My system runs games just fine and dandy, thank you. Fix your other broken shit that interferes with my gaming.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You're absolutely right, except for the part where you said increase gaming performance by going back to Win 7. That's just plain wrong.
Crap on windows 10 all you like but it quite demonstrably in all benchmarks both for gaming, and general purpose use is faster more resource friendly, and better at allocating multiple processor tasks than Windows 7.
Ignoring the speed boost you get with Directx 12, and ignoring the supposed speed boost that this system also provides, you STILL get better frame rates in out of the box Windows 10 system than in Windows 7.
That big fat paycheck from Microsoft.
How can you say "Game Mode WILL MAXIMIZE gaming performance" and have zero information on what it does?
Windows has had a "prioritize performance for the user focused app" since like Windows 98 or 2000. So you can't just say "it will likely do that" because it's already supposed to do that.
I'm ALL FOR new features, kernel improvements, and so on. For Windows or Linux. I really don't care, as I use BOTH on a daily basis. But FFS, either give us some information to validate your claims, pick more conservative wording, or just straight up tell us this is an advertisement.
What if I really, really, want to play in Windowed mode?
We used to call that the OS, you just didn't install a bunch of stupid stuff.
Nowadays it would appear that there is so much bloatware baked into what they are passing off as an OS that they need a special mode for games.....
I'm sure Windows Update will still interrupt games at the worst possible time regardless.
Microsoft’s description lists the feature as a mode to let a PC make gaming the “top priority to improve your game’s quality.”
So basically Microsoft is taking the following Windows API call that's been around forever and marketing it as a new feature: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...
Brilliant Microsoft marketing, just absolutely brilliant...
We'll make great pets
Turbo button is back! Hail to the Turbo!
Because if it suppresses popup boxes and unauthorized reboots like it should, in addition to improving performance, then people will just leave their PCs in Game Mode all the time! But if it doesn't do any of those useful things, and only works with Microsoft Store games, then no one will use it at all.
And not only the game to pay for, but a whole new OS EULA to agree too and OS to buy. Even if none of the games changed.
Really?
And what about hardware too old or slow to run W10? Or without drivers. Or it's a 32 bit processor. Have to buy a new PC, slinging the old. Makes a game pretty expensive when you have to add £1000 of new PC to keep running it.
What if a game doesn't work under W10?
Seems like you are making a huge number of assumptions
If games go steam only then they will lose sales. If online games drop OS support, they will lose games.And, being made to buy new hardware because some game developer decided it really grates. Heck, the USA should be even more pissed off at being told what to pay for to continue to use what they already paid for.
You're making believe that it's fine because you decided to ignore the problems and go ahead anyway. But that's not true for many.
Hell, some can't afford to buy a new computer without saving for months to buy one, giving up other entertainments along the way. Just because you have spare cash living with your mum and dad rent free doesn't mean that everyone can splurge like you.
Still have an XP box,running fine,because several games won'trun on Win7.
Still have a Win98 box because
a) some games won't run on XP either
b) some games aren't time synched, so running on the box running XP makes an unplayable game.
MS dropped XP long ago, and there's bugger all they can do about Win98,because it doesn't activate.
Either MS drop activation for XP, meaning I get continued use of XP without MS's say-so, or they drop allowing activations, in which case I can use the cracked copy, which is still using XP without MS's say-so.
So, no. You are wrong in my case.
That Win10 obsoleted hardware is one reason why I will stick with Win7 as the last OS.
When Win7 support ends on steam, every game using the steam launcher, and, yes, that does include singleplayer games that have a separate launcher, see Skyrim, will stop working.
No point "buying" a game when someone else gets to tell me when I have to stop playing it, because it's still "their property".
Can I get MY money back,then? What? I've used the game and got value out of it? Well, you used my money in the meantime and got value out of it. Swapsies back, pls. Oh, it;s YOUR money, is it? No, I'm afraid though it looked like a sale, it wasn't, it was a license, you licensed my money.
Vista flopped because the PC manufacturers didn't believe Microsoft on the release date so they dragged their asses in the development of Windows drivers for the new driver model. Then when Vista was released, manufacturers were caught with their pants down. People upgrading to Vista ended up with blue-screens or just couldn't get their hardware to work. Of course, everyone blamed Microsoft.
Well it didn't help that Vista ran like a dog on low end machines. WinXP required 64MB RAM, Vista upped that to 1GB - that's 16x as high in a little over five years - and even that was terrible. I helped a friend who bought a mahcine like that with Vista pre-installed, it was simply painful. I helped him install XP and that worked so much better, since we weren't bumping into the 4GB limit anyway there was no major downsides. While they didn't officially lower the requirement again for Win7, it's generally recognized that Microsoft put Vista on a diet. Three years later not only was more memory common, it actually ran far better on far less.
Other annoying features was an overly aggressive Superfetch, causing disk churn and annoying lacks in responsiveness. And while UAC might be a good thing, it was very noisy to begin with and lots of software triggered UAC prompts more often than they should or even when they didn't need to. For users that already trusted the software they ran under XP it was easy to see the annoyance and hard to see the immediate benefit. It was a whole host of issues that made Vista a giant flop.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I guess they aren't developing after they roll this out. Is the the "drop the mic" for game developers?
Nah... just marketing wiping their cans with word-paper.
It would be nice if they could quantify an actual increase in quality. Dial to 7? They can't. They can say "I added this feature". They can't say "it is x units better". Better is something they are too lazy, stupid, and incapable of measuring - so much for their machine learning making the meaningful into the measurable. Even if they could it is a bit of a moving target, but some measure would be nice.
I would like to see a globally valid measure of game quality driven by deep learning. That would have value for a developer.
-EngrStudent
So if I put solitaire into the autostart folder, I can finally stop those annoying win10 updates and myriad mysterious internet connections???
Maybe I can finally get work done??
Now if they could change the UI so that buttons are recognizable and repair the really bad win update system !
Most people don't upgrade the OS, you can see that perfectly clearly at the dismal %25 Windows 10 marketshare even though it was offered as a free upgrade and MS used all kinds of sleazy tactics to trick people into the upgrade. Most people end up with a new OS only when buying new PC's and the major problem Vista had was buckling to Vendor pressure and lowering the "required minimum specs" just before release. Those lowered specs simply were not good enough to provide a consistent and satisfactory user experience in Vista. MS significantly increased minimum specs in Windows 7, RAM requirements were doubled among other things
"It's still not clear exactly how Game Mode will improve gaming performance, but it's likely that Windows 10 will simply suppress system processes"
Do you mean like renice does it on a Linux system.
It's not quite the same. There's still a Vista box here from someone who did an end run around IT to bring what was initially an utter piece of shit onto the premises. It wasn't just the drivers, it couldn't even connect to a MS Domain or Workgroup without some command line fucking about.
After all the fixes it's stable and like MS Windows 7 with a few bits missing, many parts on the configuration side. I think it's even missing "ipconfig" from memory.
I think a part of the problem is that many of those tasks are not something the user wants to have running while they are running a game or other single task. Just dropping back to MS Windows 7 removes some of those tasks dedicated to advertising etc that would be better scheduled for a time when the game or application is not running.
You may ignore it as only a problem with low end machines, but the resource issues with MS Windows 10 make it a very poor choice for some of the machines it is on. Over Xmas I made an i3 machine that is only used for Skype and Firefox usable again by rolling it back to MS Windows 7. The owner joked that the ten in MS Windows 10 is the minimum number of minutes it takes to start up.
Sorry but that is delusional. The resource requirements for Windows 10 are lower than for Windows 7 and 8. On constrained machines you get a nice benefit from upgrading Windows especially on RAM constrained systems. Windows 10 took freeing up memory to the next level.
Where the fuck did you get that from? The i3 laptop in question went from working on MS Win7 to being unbearable slow on MS Win10, something many have observed. It's just not designed for the older hardware, which is fair enough, but unfortunately the user installed an OS that was unsuitable. Calling me "delusional" only reflects on yourself since reality argued otherwise, and is really just a cowardly way of calling me a lair if you think what I wrote does not reflect what actually happened.
Perhaps think a bit before handing out insults when someone is doing no more than providing an anecdote of where the right tool for the job is different to the right tool for your maxed out gaming rig or whatever the only computer you are using is.
Where the fuck did you get that from?
Absolutely everywhere. This has been tested, compared, measured, benchmarked, and written about in the press over and over again for every release of Windows, and they have all been measurably faster than Windows 7.
The i3 laptop in question went from working on MS Win7 to being unbearable slow on MS Win10
Fix your laptop.
and is really just a cowardly way of calling me a lair
Nope. I don't think you're a liar. But I also don't think you know what you're talking about either.
It wasn't mine (please at least try paying attention), and I did fix it by rolling back to MS Windows7 which was the entire point of the story here.
As for your "absolutely everywhere", I must admit I have not seen such claims anywhere apart from advertising material which is clearly both overhyped and utterly misleading. If it's "absolutely everywhere" surely you can provide at least one link? Go on, prove that you are more than just a clueless fanboy and that you can think across the board instead of just having experience with one gaming rig with specs good enough for MS Windows 10.
and I did fix it by rolling back to MS Windows7 which was the entire point of the story here.
So you took the second best option.
As for your "absolutely everywhere", I must admit I have not seen such claims anywhere
Then there's no helping you. Windows 8 and 10 were widely benchmarked in all manners including synthetic benchmarks like pcmark, and with specific test to claim Microsoft's advertisements (and yes you're right they did advertise that it has a lower memory footprint). It all comes out in its support. Do your own homework (but you won't).
So no examples? Not even one?
Deluded fanboy detected.
When you are asked to work on somebody else's computer other than your gaming rig you'll understand this thread.
See subject & not just @ parent thread/process level but child threads too. I implemented others vs. one you note CreateProcess https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10053471&cid=53618285/ & SetThreadPriority https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10053471&cid=53567699/
(... w/ actual working CODE you can use to create your OWN 'game launchers IF you wish...)
* That is, IF you code in Object Pascal/Delphi (but translating API's across languages = easy so, there ya are... they work - & if you REALLY know what you're about, you can dive right down into the 'native' NT api beyond these abstracts to it...)
APK
P.S.=> HOWEVER: IF you don't code? Then, You're better off imo just doing away w/ background processes &/or services instead to save CPU cycles wasted on them (especially if you don't want them or use them)... apk