14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is implementing a new so-called Game Mode in Windows 10 that’s supposed to boost gaming performance on the desktop, but up until now, the company has provided only basic information regarding the way this new feature is supposed to work.
At the Game Developers Conference, however, Eric Walston from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group discussed the Game Mode, explaining that with this feature, Windows 10 will attempt to provide the best possible gaming experience for the available hardware.
Maximizing the potential of available resources
Specifically, Game Mode was designed to prioritize the main process of the game and to allocate as many resources as possible, with Walston explaining that both the CPU and the GPU will get through a series of tweaks once this feature is enabled with the end goal of making the game the one and only priority.
Most of the CPU cores will thus be used for running the game, while the remaining ones will power the rest of the processes that are vital for the operating system.
Ars writes that out of an eight-core processor, six of them will be used just for the game itself, with threads that are being used by other tasks to be moved from the gaming-devoted cores. In essence, what Microsoft is trying to do is to use as many cores of the CPU as possible to power the game, keeping them entirely free of any other activities.
In the case of GPU, the operating system will use an approach that’s already implemented: prioritizing the window in focus. Most of the GPU cycles will be assigned to the game, and the rest of the processes running on a system will receive a reduced amount of GPU memory in order to boost gaming performance.
The difference brought by Game Mode obviously depends on a lot of factors, starting with the available hardware, and game developers themselves will need to implement support for this feature to determine how much it can improve performance.
The Game Mode will go live for retail users with the Creators Update due in April, and it’s already available for testing in the existing Windows 10 preview builds.