Windows 10’s Upcoming ‘Game Mode’ Will Be A Toggle, Not A Forced Feature

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft revealed lots about its upcoming ‘Creators Update’ for Windows 10, and for gamers, there’s an awful lot to look forward to. At the forefront of this update will be ‘Beam’, an overarching tool for all things game recording and streaming. This comes hot on the heels of Microsoft acquiring Beam this past August for an undisclosed sum of Minecraft Redstone.

For those who care a lot about gaming performance (it should be safe to assume that that’s all of us), there’s another thing to look forward to: ‘Game Mode’. In a recent Xbox blog post, Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra describes the feature: “Our vision is for Game Mode to optimize your Windows 10 PC for increased performance in gaming.”

‘Game Mode’ will enhance Win32 & UWP content

Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us anything whatsoever about how Game Mode is going to achieve its goal of giving us better performance. It’s all speculation at this point, but we’d have to imagine that Game Mode will suspend certain Windows 10 services that could utilize the GPU or CPU. To that end, even Windows Explorer could be suspended, but could be reactivated as soon as the game closes, or someone minimizes the focus of their game (eg: through an Alt+Tab).

One thing’s for sure: we’re bound to learn a lot more about Game Mode in the months ahead, leading up to release of the Creators Update this spring.

@Deathspawner Toggle.

— Mike Ybarra (@XboxQwik) January 16, 2017

As someone who can’t seem to go a day without benchmarking some type of hardware, the immediate concerns I had with Game Mode was that 1) it’d negate previous test results, and / or 2) it’d be a forced feature. As it happens, Ybarra is an active Twitter user, and wasted no time in responding to the latter question: Game Mode will not be forced, something that should appease our colleagues that also benchmark day-to-day.

As for the former note, about whether or not Game Mode would effectively negate previous results, that’s going to remain unanswered until the feature launches in its final form. I am willing to bet that the performance differences are going to be so minor, that we shouldn’t feel compelled to retest everything we need to, but at the same time, I’d happily welcome significant performance improvements through Game Mode.

Regardless of what Game Mode becomes, I’m at least thankful that it will be a toggle, rather than a forced feature. It’s bad enough we have to deal with forced OS updates – but hopefully that will be remedied soon enough as well.