First somewhat disappointing test of Windows 10 Game Mode

Robert Sole 30 January 2017

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Game Mode for Windows 10 is not as promising as you might expect, although we would be facing an initial version of this functionality, which Microsoft will improve and polish before the arrival of Windows 10 in April.

Microsoft's commitment to include a system called Game Mode in Windows 10 shortly, has been received positively. This mode promises to allocate 80% of resources directly to gaming and the rest for applications running in the background. It remains to be seen how this translates into an effective performance gain when we are playing games. Possibly the difference is a maximum 5FPS or perhaps it does not translate into more frames per second, but in less heat generation, who knows, for now.

Those who are in the Insiders program have access to the first phases of the new functions of Creators Update, which will provide extra functions, which are gradually revealed and that would not currently exist in Windows 10. These news would arrive in April. The modifications will be in things that we will see, such as the user interface, some bug fixes and new functionalities to improve the user experience.

Microsoft is working hard so that in April we have all these operational functions. The most prominent of all is the one we have discussed, the Game Mode, a system that wants to improve the user experience in video games. This will improve the performance of the team and the priority of resources before tasks that are always running in the background.

Ghacks.net has had access to the Game Mode and they have done some tests of this new mode. This works that you have had access to could be a beta phase where not all functions and features are implemented. The data at the moment are not as interesting or promising as one would think, rather, they point to more fair than expected. To carry out the tests they have used the Intel i5 2500K processor working at 3.3GHz, 8GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 960. For the tests the AnTuTu v6.05 benchmark and the games Resident Evil 6 and Star Swarm Stress Test have been used.

Game Mode will be an automatic utility, as long as we use the games from the official Microsoft store. For the rest of the games this must be done manually. This is something absurd, since it should always be activated automatically and less than work in conjunction with the largest video game platform, such as Steam. The Game Mode benchmark data is not at all interesting, since the improvement has been practically insignificant.

The logical thing is that Microsoft is finishing optimizing the Game Mode. The data that we are seeing will be relative, because we imagine that more data will appear until the official release in April. Microsoft bets on video games, not only on the console, finally also on the computer, which was about time. This may be due to the bad moment of consoles, which fall in sales or do not meet expectations and the good moment of specialized hardware for computer gaming.