It’s also enough to push Gears solidly past the 30 fps level, which many PC gamers consider the minimum acceptable frame rate. That might not sound like much, but when you’re hovering around 30 fps total, that’s an increase of nearly 22 percent. But Game Mode proves truly useful in that reduced state, increasing the average frame rate by slightly more than 6 fps. First of all, its performance absolutely plummeted with the background processes active, by roughly 50 percent overall. Brad Chacos/IDGīioshock and Tomb Raider each saw a scant average increase of 1 fps or so-nothing your eye would detect in real life.
We opened an auto-playing YouTube playlist in Edge, started cranking tunes in Spotify, and activated AVG’s antivirus software-a reasonable simulation of what real-world gamers might run while playing-then retested each game with Game Mode both on and off. If you don’t have any programs running in the background competing for precious CPU threads, Game Mode offers practically no value.Īfter that, it was time to muddy the waters with background processes. Brad Chacos/IDGĪs you can see, Game Mode made almost no difference in the trio of games we tested.
But what if you’re not?įirst, each benchmark was run with nothing extra running in the background except Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software.
If you’re running a relatively modern gaming rig with a desktop-caliber graphics card, don’t expect much out of Game Mode. Heck, PC Gamer saw a sizable performance decrease in Hitman with Game Mode enabled. Early Game Mode testing by PC Gamer, PCGamesN, and Laptop Mag on gaming-focused systems saw little to no performance increase. This is a shifting of Windows resources, not a miracle. Microsoft downplayed the feature’s effect on raw frame rates when it revealed how Game Mode works, telling reviewers to expect a 2- to 5-percent performance increase. There’s no need to restart your game for Game Mode to take effect, though you do need to manually enable the feature for each and every game you want to use it with.īut how does it feel? That’s where things get interesting. Once you’ve done so, simply close the dialog box and Game Bar to get going. Check the box next to Use Game Mode for this game near the top. Click the Settings cog on the right side of the bar to bring up a bunch of options.
To activate Game Mode, open your game, then press Windows key + G to bring up the Windows 10 Game Bar. (Click on any image in this article to enlarge it.) The option to activate Game Mode is at the top of the Game Bar’s settings.
Unfortunately it’s not immediately clear how to enable Game Mode manually, as the new Creators Update feature is hidden in a particularly dark corner of the Game Bar. Microsoft says some whitelisted games will enable Game Mode automatically, but we’ve yet to see that happen, even with Microsoft-published Windows Store games like Gears of War 4 and Forza Horizon 3. (Adios, unexpected antivirus scans!) Game Mode grants games more GPU cycles and a set number of CPU threads, though the exact details vary depending on your system configuration.įortunately, Game Mode can work with all games, not just Windows Store games. It does so by dedicating a big chunk of your system’s resources to the game you’re playing, which prevents background processes from muscling in and potentially disrupting your experience. P.s I tried both USB 3.0 on the Phanteks case as well as the USB 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1 on the back io.Game Mode is designed to improve the performance of your PC games, both raw frame-rate speeds and overall smoothness (which Microsoft calls consistency). USB 2.0 should have read and write speeds of at least 60MBps correct? When offloading them I was capping out at a measly 18MBps.Īny insight to why this would be would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! I tried offloading 22gb worth of 4k video footage off (3) SD cards with a USB 2.0 SD card reader. So the only problem I ran into was today. Decided to not go ahead and keep either of them but build a computer my self running Windows 10. Before this build I tried a 5K iMac with i5 and 4K iMac with an i7. I built a computer this weekend and everything went flawlessly.