Windows 10’s Creators Update is now available to everyone. As such, and since it supports the new Game Mode, we decided to put six CPU-bound titles to the test.
Windows 10’s Game Mode currently targets performance enhancements in two ways: a) by increasing overall framerate or peaks and b) by increasing in average framerates or consistency. According to the company, this mode works best when your PC is experiencing resource contention.
This basically means that when your PC is working hard to run your game and possibly other concurrent software, Game Mode can help manage system resources more efficiently and optimize them for gaming.
For testing purposes, we used an Intel i7 4930K (overclocked at 4.2Ghz) with 8GB RAM, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, Windows 10 64-bit and the latest WHQL version of the GeForce drivers.
The games we tested were: Styx: Shards of Darkness, Total War: WARHAMMER, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, Space Hulk: Deathwing, Mafia III and Forza Horizon 3. All games were tested at 1080p on Ultra settings.
For Styx: Shards of Darkness, Mafia III and Space Hulk: Deathwing we tested some heavy CPU scenes. For Forza Horizon 3, we tested tested the train station in Surfer’s Paradise. For Civilization VI and Total War: WARHAMMER we used the built-in benchmarks. Morever, we’ve only included the DX11 results of Total War: WARHAMMER. In DX12 mode, our GPU usage dropped significantly and Game Mode did not improve things at all.
As we’ve already said, the aforementioned games suffer from CPU issues, as all of them rely heavily on one CPU core/thread. Therefore, we thought that these games would benefit, even by small percentages, by this new mode.
Unfortunately, Game Mode did nothing to improve our overall gaming experience. We should note that Game Mode is still in its early days and may see some future improvements, however those with high-end or mid-end systems that are – for whatever reason – limited by their CPUs will not see, right now, any performance improvements.
And that’s that!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
“Unfortunately, Game Mode did nothing to improve our overall gaming experience.” This, and more mind-blowing news, at 10pm tonight!
No but seriously, thanks for testing this obviously so we all know for sure.
Wow! What a surprise! Gamemode does barely anything!
-No one ever
The tests in this article are awful. No frame variance at all. Also tested on a clean system with no background programs running (something MS said Gamemode would help the most with). Other sites HAVE found a performance increase with GM on, on some machines.
Yep, GIGO. Garbage tests, garbage results. KINDA like the data mining this site sites does.
Yeah, more than disable the useless Game Mode and this option too: http://image.prntscr.com/image/01e2fa4c2d9c4e46b76995b1407cfca0.png
’cause it won’t let you have exlcusive fullscreen mode if active, I even disabled the “full screen optimizations” in the executable and installed the latest Nvidia drivers, nothing has changed, now GTAV e Witcher 3 have some random and heavy stutter every 5-10 seconds…
Jeez microsoft, stop s**tting around with those damn updates!
Well they did say only a select few games get this boost.
Gears of War 4 got an extra 10% boost and it fix this weird fps hiccup i have been having.
Game bar (and the “Enable Game Mode for this game” option) was present in all of them.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cfe88ee952b3462752e24c07c7da4193e83f4c114f136d82a3053e92e7cc1b79.png
I hereby present this well earned award to Windows 10 Game Mode.
works better with 4k where the system is at its performance limits with gtx 1080. Also this and the new Nvidia drivers + HDR is broken for my only vulcan game, DOOM. My colors turn the natural looking red to purple.
Space Hulk: Deathwing actually lost FPS with the update?
Damn, what the f*ck did they do?
PCWorld results: “Tested: Windows 10’s Game Mode makes unplayable games playable – sometimes”.
Minimal FPS:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d13ac4c8274edfa024f1e46b0f5d7cfcabe7041435d6939ebe7a6f9fb798bd62.jpg
Average FPS (doesn’t change):
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/317f358d57d270f5d6c863b77a99439d5198896fb9dbdb5d00723a953e393c42.jpg
What did you have running in the background? I think will only benifit people that have a crap load of programs sat in the taskbar. Most real PC gamers wouldn’t have that anyway so won’t see much of a change. Try it with and without other programs running that most ‘normies’ may have there.
im seeing anywhere from 3-8 fps increase in my playing around with it.
i5 6600k/gtx1080
alot of games have no diff.
HOWEVER when using it on my sons 6570/i3 i noticed overwatch went from 50 fps to a solid 60. didnt get to try other games on it yet though.
those complaining need to realize this is for strong machines, it for older/subpar rigs.
It’s for strong machines that doesn’t need these features in the first place right?
This is such a ridiculous test. Microsoft clearly stated that this only helps when you have background tasks running. Of course you didn’t see performance gains… Next time, please have a better methodology.
Look at this benchmark instead:http://www.pcworld.com/article/3187171/windows/tested-windows-10s-game-mode-makes-unplayable-games-playable-sometimes.html
Game mode right now is for people with older CPUs and GPUs not overclocked i7’s with 4+ cores and 980ti’s. This is the worst testing methodology you could possibly use.
This is probably the most ridiculous test I’ve seen yet especially since far more reliable sources have shown improvements on older hardware.
I tested it myself on a a surface pro 4 and it grabbed me an extra 5fps average in everything I tried it with. Why? Simple, it’s a 2 core cpu and Iris 540 graphics from Intel.
Game mode TODAY isn’t for people like us. It’s for people with aging hardware that don’t plan to upgrade.
But I guess another article about how awful Microsoft is is just what your hit counter needed. What’s wrong? Unique traffic for the month down? Ahh look comments hating on Ms how predictable…I bet 100% of the PC made were made on Windows and then a small percentage were made via a mobile platform.
Pathetic comments for a pathetic article. I need to make a mental note, don’t visit DSO. Add it to n4g and all the other sites that beg for clicks from them.
I don’t even know why you bothered to come here if all you came here to do is crap all over anyone who isn’t patting MS’s back all the time.
Am I to expect some quip tossed back at me because I’m somehow on the “bad” side?. Because that’s how half the net reacts when their opinion is challenged from across the globe. Very little realise that what they said was rather too far or too harsh, but instead refuse to acknowledge any miscalculations made and instead spend the rest of their time trying to validate what they just tossed across the room at someone else.
I came here to see if a fair test was done. It wasnt.
It has nothing to do with back Pat’s. I’ll call anyone out on their bs regardless of platform or Company.
If you find half assed testing acceptable and you wanna join in on making fun of any company based on nonsense then you are included in my rant. Act like sheeple and get treated like sheeple.
I’m a fan of gaming too so I have the same reasons as you to click the difference is I have a mind of my own and I seek the truth whether it bolsters my argument or destroys it.
Try it sometime. Being smart is fun.
Did I join in on making fun of said company though?. Again this is pulling back to my original point, where anything not said in agreeance with what you are talking about, is somehow seen and marked as something to ridicule and berate, rather than to understand. You’re even setting up your own vindication of the resulting marking on me based on what you think alone, it’s like you don’t even want to understand anyone who doesn’t agree with you, that isn’t a very smart approach at all.
If anything it shows that one is of a narrow mind and quick to anger, especially upon disagreement.
Being smart is fun, acting like a tool towards others because they don’t share your views or agree with them isn’t, it shows that you’re willing to become like those you loathe, like it or not.
Google “microsoft astroturfing”. You are wasting time with him. Just report him to the Federal Trade Communion on their toll free number or website. I sent them his entire post history which was easily found with timestamps. All Microsoft, all the time, attacking any criticism. Most blatant shill here.
There’s nothing illegal about that and the FTC doesn’t give a crap. It’s not their problem.
No it is fun and I’m just having fun. I know exactly what I’m doing. You clearly don’t. I’m calling out a website for knowingly making stupid claims and I’m calling out people who defend their “we didn’t even try!” Testing methodology.
I don’t know you personally, I’m basing my comments off people defending something dumb and the best part is some of them probably know defending this crap is dumb but they do it anyways because it’s Microsoft.
I’ve called ms out more times than I can count both online and to their faces on Skype calls at work but that isn’t the point. The point is defending something stupid then making fun of any person pointing out how stupid it is.
Why do you care if your posts get flagged or even deleted if you don’t intend to come here anymore anyway?
Why? Should be obvious. Misinformation spread by censoring posts that call it out.
If someone can’t handle being wrong and their next step is to try and censor the person they disagree with then that person has no logical argument except single the initial post is critical of the website itself who do you think the moderators would choose to side with?
If websites don’t want to be called out for bad practices they shouldn’t allow comments and if people can’t handle being called out for defending something that’s clearly flawed they shouldn’t be reading comments or making them.
As for coming back here I have no intention of doing so. That being said sometimes you get a story in a news feed and click it without looking at the URL. I can’t mouse over links on mobile and I’m not going to longpress everything I see either.
My guess is that you are a new reader. In that case, comments with specific words are being filtered and censored (only those words). We do not delete posts (unless of course they are just attacks to other readers, for example comments like “F’ you r*tard”). Your comment was simply pending manual approval and is now visible.
The words that are censored are due to Google’s ad network rules.
Glad to hear it. Just interesting that suddenly every reply was “awaiting approval”
Id never insult someone like that and if someone did it to me id not care. All I want is the truth regardless of topic.
It’s not that you call a site out for something, it’s the way you do it. You should know that calling a site pathetic and the people commenting pathetic is going to put people on the defensive and some are going to attack you right back.
So there is something wrong with calling something that’s pathetic pathetic? They knew this test would show absolutely nothing. They still posted the article. That’s a pathetic excuse for Journalism. You are supposed to inform readers not mislead them. So many sites have popped up in the last few years that post as much blatantly false information as they do good information. I find that sad but worse than that is the endless supply of… People that defend it. No wonder sites can just say whatever they feel like.
Calling comments that back up the article pathetic is a far cry from calling the person who made it pathetic. Even if I said “you are pathetic if you believe this” I would stand by it because I explained quite clearly what was wrong with the article. Defending something that is just blatantly wrong and written for clicks….Come on
I’m not quite sure if they are defending the quality of the article or the fact that they are mad that I pointed out a major hole but it’s still pathetic.
If the word pathetic sounds to harsh then plug in sad in its place. As far as I’m concerned my logic is sound. I didn’t name names in my initial post and nobody was forced to engage me. They could have ignored it, but to respond and call someone a shill for pointing out a massive flaw in an article just makes my choice of words all the more appropriate.
People constantly bash on Microsoft but give just about everyone else a free pass for anything. It’s sad to see but what is even more so is when challenged people can’t seem to handle it.
“They knew this test would show absolutely nothing.”
I disagree….. I learned a great deal from this post.
For example; the Creator’s Update is costing some games actual frames. I had no idea before I poked through that chart!
😮
Wtf, I didn’t even flag your comments and yet you’re blaming me for something you have zero proof of at all..
Right so you’re basically trying to defend your own attempts at attacking the site and it’s users at every turn, gotcha.
I’ll keep on doing what I do, which isn’t blaming other users for being moderated on comments that don’t entirely make much sense outside of hatred and contempt. By all means come back at me with some witty retort, it’s all but assured with the way you behave around here.
I’m not being moderated and I didn’t blame YOU for flagging but someone was because they didn’t seem to like a website being called out for essentially? click bait. I respond to comments by email, sometimes a byproduct of that is it gets posted under the wrong place.
You need to relax. OMG the horrible accusations… It probably was you anyways lol.
Yes I sure did call out the site because what they did was nonsense and misleading. I didn’t call out any specific user of the site I called out PEOPLE who would defend the site using a absolute crap way of testing something. If those people can’t tell this test and this article is highly flawed they need to educate themselves before fighting with people.
Yes apparently that seems to include you there bud and this reply is definitely going to the right place because I went to the site to make sure.
Let me ask you a question…
Do you like being mislead?
You sure like the word pathetic don’t you? Allow me to make a sentence using your favorite word then. You are so pathetic trying to defend pathetic Microsoft in the most pathetic way possible.. and remember stay pathetic! 😉
Thanks, but I’ll defend anything or anyone that deserves it. Microsoft included. Hell I’d defend you if you weren’t one of the kinds of people who sees a large group and just joins in because they feel the need to fit in or gang up on someone.
You follow and you will always follow. That much is clear. Pretty pathetic amirite
haha you are welcome! Thank you for the reply, it was a blast! 😉
Known Microsoft astroturfer is trying to take a moral high ground and attacking real journalism. Report this clown to the FTC people. 16,000 dollar fine per instance and most of these scumbag criminal astroturfers make minimum wage. Astroturfing only works because people don’t take 10 seconds out of their day to report these clowns. and stop them from manipulating and polluting forums.
lol real journalism
maybe report me too, loser. see if I care, Ioser
So, it will slightly improve performance for people gaming on hardware they shouldn’t be gaming on.
Sounds about right.
lol wait till he shove some denuvo up your a**
the d***head has over 50 denuvo articles lol
what about people with GPUs like the 750ti SC? is game mode for that?
Depends on the cpu since it’s design goal is to give more resources to the cpu. I don’t know many people who are running tasks that take up gpu time while playing a game…
Right now game mode is messing with priority of the cpu. By the time it’s finished it will be essentially pausing tasks other than the game much in the same way a virtual machine can be paused.
The issue with this sites test is they are using a capable cpu and gpu. Had they used a 5 year old i3 or i5 they would have seen a couple of extra fps but the game used also matters. If the game isnt making tons of draw calls and the cpu can handle them and all the tasks going on then it makes no difference.
I have an it 5820k (6 cores@5ghz), 32 gigs of quad channel ddr4 and a GTX 1080 highly overclocked. I’m not going to see any benefit.
Take that 1080 and pair it with a CPU that has issues keeping it and the memory fed for the game and you will see a benefit.
Testing methodology is King. You need a baseline system that’s completely modern for gaming then you need a few cpus from various generations, core counts, ability to multi thread or not and also gpus from multiple generations and across different power levels from said generations. Then you test 1 by 1 each cpu paired with each gpu all at stock clocks because overclocked systems have variables.
Just leave it to sites like digital foundry or pcper or one of 50 YouTube channels run by people who know how to test such a feature in the first place.
I was hoping that game mode would be much more robust and bring the operating system closer to dos.
I haven’t paid much attention to the Game Mode setting but I think all that it really does is shut down background programs while gaming but I thought Windows does that for the most part anyway. I’m wondering if it also shuts down your antivirus program.
Well… I don’t have horrible stutters in GTA V anymore since I updated to Windows 10 Creator…
I could already get 60FPS with my GTX 660 and core i5 though… now I still get that, but with less frame drop during high speed driving through the city.
1-3 fps is within the margin of error, right ?
Absolutely.
did not fix forza 6 apex stutter
Thank you, thank you! I would also like to see frame history time. Might shed some light on better lower FPS or more stable FPS. Can you please test that!?
Surprise mfer.
Name of the second image: adsdasdas.png
Classic
I have seen improvement on my rocket league game of about 12-14 fps increase with better stability
Back when “Game mode” was first revealed I already pointed it out that if a game is properly optimized it will already use all the resources available and “game mode” would not improve anything. And if a game is poorly optimized this will not magically “optimize” the game, it will still run poorly. It’s up to the developers to optimize their games and the user to know what their hardware is and is not capable off.
I would say the manner you’ve gone about it is the off putting for folks, at least generally when you start name calling and throwing insults, it devalues your argument, people often use it as a sign the argument doesn’t have weight, or that they are losing, as is often the case and therefore, less inclined to listen.
But you are right in that it isn’t a fair test, in the sense that Game Mode is supposed to benefit lower end and older machines and not so much higher end machines. But at the same time, it shows how it may affect those of us with more modern/more powerful set ups. Ideally they would have done tests on BOTH types of machines for fair comparison. The article admits that those of with mid-end or high-end machines for the moment, won’t notice a difference, which implies that lower end machines might.
And interesting some games lost performance. So I don’t think the article is completely “pathetic”, there is information useful to us with high-end machines and this update and may well be a decider for people with such machines on whether to get the update, or not bother. If like me, the only useful sounding thing of the Creators Update was game mode.
Granted some folk are very quick to the “Microsoft sucks”, as people often are, as they are with a number of companies. And if anything, I do find a number of people on the internet are very quick to judge and slow to understand, but welcome to the internet 😛 Over the years I went from hating Microsoft (My XP machines pre SP 2 were unstable and Vista was bloated as heck and I was just getting awful experiences on both), to liking them (XP SP2 and Windows 7 both were stable as hell) to thinking they’re okay (Windows 8’s UI choices being bad for me, but still fast and stable and Windows 10 giving me mixed opinions, but I still like the OS)
And I get you are trying to give Microsoft kudos for actually going “you have low end or older hardware, but still play games, here, have something to help”, and in knowing people who cannot afford to upgrade their systems but still play games, this is a plus point and I would like to see exactly how it benefits them. In fairness, I wouldn’t go to this article to find out, because it offers nothing to those users.
But I ended up on this article, because I was also interested in how it might affect a system build like mine, as I had to wait forever for the update to install and wasted my afternoon yesterday doing it as it ended updating, even though I didn’t want to yet, and I wanted to see if it was worthwhile, which it wasn’t, sadly.
So….if this is made to help cpu bound gamers…..why in God’s name did you test it on an I7?
You can’t make up failure of this level. I wish this was fake news.
Whatever your third world country marketing firm that is breaking the law told you to? Love the phony upvotes from people who don’t even post here to LOL.
Yea I’m getting paid to argue with you. You got me! Busted baby. You want my up address so you can report me? Here you go call the FTC.
98.217.234.80 and I’ve opened port 23767 for you or anyone else. Best of luck to you detective(s). Just in case you don’t understand ports it looks like this 98.217.234.80:23767
48 hours and I’ll close it. Provide some evidence to your ridiculous yet hilarious claims.
Game Mode feels a bit like placebo. I’ve used it in a few games so far and as I activated it I thought “yeah, there’s definitely an improvement!”… until I actually ran the benchmarks with and without it and realized there was either no difference or a difference of 1-2 frames.
I believe under certain circumstances it might work better (after all, some games might take more advantage of it than others depending of the way they were programmed), but so far only GTA V had an actual noticeable experience.
P.S.: my PC is quite underpowered for a gaming machine, so it’s the kind of machine that’s supposed to have a more noticeable improvement.