This is how Windows 10’s upcoming Game Mode works

Microsoft is ready to make gaming on Windows PCs great again. ‘Game Mode’, a feature first discovered in December last year and officially revealed in a non-working form in a Windows 10 preview build two weeks ago is about ready for testers to try.

The major new addition in the test build of Windows 10 that's coming later this week (Update, Jan 28: Build 15019 is now available), Game Mode is, in short, a way to optimize your Windows 10 PC for increased performance in gaming. There are two ways to engage Game Mode: fire up a game and click the Game Mode option in the Game Bar (press Windows key + G); or have the mode run automatically if the game is in the “allowed list”. Microsoft has pre-set a list of games, but you’re able to manually add a game to it.

Of course, you must be wondering if Game Mode works with Win32 games like those from Steam and Origin. I spoke to Kevin Gammill, partner group program manager for the Xbox platform, and the answer is an unequivocal yes: Game Mode works with both Win32 and UWP games.

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Before today, there’s also quite a bit of speculation on how Game Mode actually works behind the scenes to optimize gaming performance. For this first implementation, I was told the team has focused on ensuring a more consistent experience throughout gameplay - to minimize the “peaks and valleys” many gamers face (e.g., smooth framerates one moment, sluggish system the next), so to speak.

To achieve this balanced experience, one of the things Game Play does is to avoid CPU thread contention where it’s possible. So you won’t run into a situation where a piece of software (say, a cloud backup service uploading files in the background) that uses 50% of the threads but yet saturate all available compute resources of the CPU core. Put another way: the game takes priority when it’s in the foreground and in focus. The same applies to GPU resources.

That said, don’t expect Game Mode to be a magic bullet for your gaming woes: it’s not going to make your GeForce GTX 980 card perform at a GTX 1080 level. I was also told that the performance gain is likely to be higher in UWP games than Win32 ones, simply because a UWP package’s entry/exit points and other variables along the way are easier to determine.

Moving forward, Microsoft is thinking of giving users more granular control so that they can dial the resource allocation knob more to their liking, but there’s no word when this will arrive. The company is also working with Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD to explore ways to make Game Mode more powerful. I asked if Game Mode support would become a requirement for making PC games, and was told that’s not the intention: Game Mode is a platform-independent and an OS-side feature designed to work with all games.

Game Mode and other new gaming features such as built-in Beam live streaming and a Gaming section in System Settings will be part of the new feature set in the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update for PC, which is currently on track for a public release this April. Select testers in the Xbox Insider Program will also be getting Beam streaming, new Cortana gaming enhancements, and Screen time parental controls in the next Creators Update build for the console.

Source: Microsoft, Xbox Wire.

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