This is really timely. I was just in a reddit discussion with someone defending game mode as a benefit. Nice to see a methodical comparison. Thank you.
same here i watched a video someone posted trying to claim it was better but all i seen was higher cpu and gpu temps with it on then with it off lol sometimes a 15-20C temp difference
I was testing out the Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling (HAGS) setting along with Game Mode, but I only tested in Minecraft, with and without a shader mod (really impacts the performance) and the results were interesting... Both HAGS and Game Mode on : Without shaders : max. 1312 / avg. 1285 / min. 1243 With shaders : max. 208 / avg. 205 / min. 204 Both HAGS and Game Mode off : Without shaders : max. 1382 / avg. 1363 / min. 1344 With shaders : max. 219 / avg. 215 / min. 214 Only Game mode on : Without shaders : max. 1354 / avg. 1333 / min. 1233 With shaders : max. 217 / avg. 215 / min. 214 Only HAGS on : Without shaders : max. 1443 / avg. 1416 / min. 1362 With shaders : max. 220 / avg. 218 / min. 217 The Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling was the winner. GPU and CPU usage stayed fairly the same throughout all tests, but game mode made the gpu% increase by quite a bit. I would love to see this being tested in other games too👍 I7 10700K (3.8 / 5.1 GHz) RTX 3060 12Gb MSI MPG Z490 GAMING PLUS
@penileymajorey7174 You should search "Destroying My RTX 4090 With Incredible Minecraft Graphics" and watch until the end of the video, some minecraft modifications will give you 5 fps even with the RTX 4090. The game is heavily modifiable and it's possible to get 8k resource packs with ray-tracing for each pixel that makes any new game look "old". It's not about competition on which game runs better, I was just commenting about something that could be potentially turned into a video.
Who needs a pc to play pc games on ultra settings,so fucking yesterday,such a waste of energy and money. I use GFN for 2 years now,best i tried in 45years of gaming . And i played ,tried and saw it all trust me 👍.
@@Mister_GreyGeforce now 😂😂 Your comment screams broke. Get a job, and earn a decent pc to play games on actually natively and not relying on streaming. It’s much better. 😂
I think Game Mode is for non-tweaked systems. If you already removed the bloatware, you optimize the power plan, unpark cores, have correct drivers in your system, etcetera, then i think Game mode could actually hurt performance more because it may try to "help" Windows when it doesn't need it anymore. I am gonna try with it off for a while.
@@easymoneeey I think it made The Witcher 3 stutter a hell of a lot less with Gamemode Off and using RivaTuner to lock the framerate to 60 fps to get correct framepacing. With Gamemode On, with any fps limiter from RivaTuner, the game would microstutter like crazy for any small action or sutff that happened on the screen, so my guess is that so far it's better off.
Didn't help there either in my experience. Difference on my partners laptop (who isn't a power gamer) was night and day, with turning it off making the games playable though the frame drops and freeze ups. Plus for multiplayer games on any system it's super bad, because it de-prioritise the network communication, leading to increase lag, system freezes and rubber banding, depending on how the games net code is written.
Rather than artificially downgrading I would like to see this using an older gen system, like a 2600k or a 4790k or whatever. Just something using an older architecture and doesnt have all the bells and whistles (althought the 4790k is still fairly beastly imo)
When you use Game Mode, Windows prioritizes your gaming experience by turning things off in the background. When you’re running a game, Game Mode: Prevents Windows Update from performing driver installations and sending restart notifications Helps achieve a more stable frame rate depending on the specific game and system
@HazardXXX Now that you mention it I just remembered that I'm using ReviOS and it has windows update disabled by default (I can still enable it at any time). So I guess it's better to disable Game Mode since Win update won't even be active.
Idk if I am facing a placebo effect but I have noticed a pattern with the game mode on windows 11 (not sure about Win10 but I fear it will be the same or worse). What happens here with me is that on my current setup of i5 10400F with RTX 3060 12G (windows 11 of course and HAGS on or off didn't feel the difference but for me I kept it on) on cpu bound games game mode off seems to be working ideal and performing the best as it can and the difference margin is hugely noticeable but when it comes to gpu bound games, game mode on seems to take away the winning trophy. So with that being said, the conclusion for me on my system is: CPU bound games = Game mode off GPU bound games = Game mode on This worked for me but I would love to see others test my theory as well and hoping to see good results. My system: Core i5 10400F 6c/12t paired with Evga RTX 3060 12G OC equipped on Msi B460m Mortar Wifi
But it’s to stop pop ups and updates from kicking in as well ( if you haven’t set up your update times, like most people don’t). Enjoy your system notifications popping up in game if you turn it off.
GPU scheduling on or off during your testing? Also, in game mode you should go through and make sure that the games you are testing are all set to High Performance (Do not use Let Windows Decide), Don't use optimizations for windowed games and Don't use Auto HDR are both CHECKED and you run all games in Full Screen mode when testing. Under System>Display>Graphics>Default graphics settings: Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling should be on (If your system can handle it), Reduce Latency: ON and Auto HDR: Off. Those capable should also enable Resizable Bar with GPU Scheduling. Ultimately, Game Mode all depends on your hardware and whether or not you have done optimizations yourself on your system or not and whether you have streaming software running and a bunch of other factors. Ultimately, this is a setting that you should take the time and test yourself as all systems and setups will be different.
Lowering thresholds may not quite be enough unfortunately. Your clock speeds are still the same and that may actually matter more than core count (depending on the game). Also there wasn't a way to drop gpu performance if that matters for game mode. Still probably doesn't help performance though lol.
"Game mode" is just a misnamed feature. It have nothing to do with gaming, it just simply disable notifications and other releated stuff that might hinder your gaming session. Nothing more.
When you use Game Mode, Windows prioritizes your gaming experience by turning things off in the background. When you’re running a game, Game Mode: Prevents Windows Update from performing driver installations and sending restart notifications Helps achieve a more stable frame rate depending on the specific game and system
I've used it personally and go from around 180fps in overwatch to around 240, and I've noticed good stability in games that previously had stability issues.
@@datgamerguy69 If you know what you are doing and where to touch you don't need it at all. There are plenty of paths to disable the windows update as a whole (as i have) and it wont do a thing on your system unless you re-enable it. And i am not talking about "pausing" it, but literally DISABLING it completly.
@@BryanTheFury if you know what you're doing. just turn game mode on and it does the same thing in a single switch LMAOOO i don't get your point you're just proving a more complex way
@@datgamerguy69 You didn't understood. I just said i disabled windows update for good. Game mode doesn't disable it, just pause it and all the actions he does but it is still running in background. You'll still have all the pack and the services running. Disabling it you can REMOVE those things and have less resource usage.
I've suspected game mode is mainly used for the Intel p-cores and e-cores and I've heard it helps on Wndows 11 but most of the time you really don't need to use game mode.
It wouldn't make any obvious difference since you're running it on a system that doesn't really have anything running on the background. A real test would be playing games while: - Netflix is installed(along with its annoying notifications) - discord - Microsoft Teams - Chrome - A second monitor - Maybe while streaming with OBS Then run a test. Game mode minimizes resource allocation on other apps that aren't using more than sufficient D3D rendering in the system. This is how it knows you are playing games in the first place. So if you only literally have the game open on a fresh install, with no other apps/3rd party software running in the background, then this test is fruitless.
its hard to impossible to know when you play a game, a game is a program like any other program.. how can you see that this specific load on the cpu is a game? Turn off updates? impossible, MS wont allow you to do that.. never. MS wont allow anyone to have a chance to abuse that feature. Shut down background stuff? no, microsoft will never allow the users to do that. It goes against microsoft policy.
I think game mode was designed for older or low end systems in mind, but I could be wrong. Might I suggest testing this with something like a dual or quad core CPU, 8gb or 16gb of ram and something like a gtx 1080, rx 470 or something that slighty struggles with todays games. Maybe the lower the system specs the better game mode works?
1% isn't worth it IMO. beautiful video bud. thanks for the info on game mode. I've been thinking of turning it off lately and with your vid, i just made my decision.
Game mode reduces input lag but I dont know by how much. Its the time you push or click a button to your character taking an action. FPS is how many times the image is being drawn on screen per a second.
Game mode isn’t designed to increase frame rate. It’s to decrease latency in your controller input. With it off, your inputs via controller have a small lag, which in first person shooters makes a massive difference. Most notably this can really damage your ability to control recoil on some games, as the lag means you’re always slightly behind the bounce and wobble.
On laptops it absolutely works. I have an MSI machine it its consistently better with game mode on. I mean every time. I think it stops the thermal throttling maybe. I haven't looked too deeply but it works every time. If you have an RTX laptop....try it.
Game Mode, Ahh the question that has been on every windows user minds since it was created. So what is game mode and what does it do? It allows all necessary resources to be priority of the game your playing. It stops WIndows Updates, virus scanner, and shuts startup menu items and puts them to sleep. It is like you are flying a space ship and your being chased by space pirates and you need to out run them so what do you do? You overclock your power by shutting down unnecessary resources so all power is routed to your ship. That is GAME MODE
The problem with competitive gaming is input lag, not FPS. You need to test process time, Latency GPU + CPU . I can have 5 more FPS, but with 1 ms of delay added.
Thanks for all your work to benchmark this! When I first read about Window's "game mode", I knew it was just a gimmick - since even games are dependent on the other, core services of the OS to run well. What happens when you take resources away from the code implementing your network stack in a multi-player game? Nothing good, that's for sure! My gaming rig is also my home media server, my security camera hub, my home backup server, my on-line backup server, hosting my daughter's small commercial web site, running BOINC with several "spare time" projects - all without missing a beat on a 10-year old, 3.3GHZ i7-5820k processor (6 cores/12 threads) with 32GB of main memory. If I throttled those other applications, it probably wouldn't even help my gaming much at all! More important than a buzz-word "gaming mode" is having a decent memory manager and scheduler in the OS, so all the ongoing workload is executed as fairly and rationally as possible!
game mode gets better the more stuff you run at the background in you game, as it give more priority for you game, but other than that no major difference.
I thought the MSconfig CPU setting only works for when windows boot, u think when you set it to 4 cores, then you only will see 4 cores in taskmgr,dont think so. and even for the memory when set to 8Gb, you still will have 32. I didnt test this but just want to let you know.
what does Game Mode do ? ( Source MS ) 1. Prevents Windows Update from performing driver installations and sending restart notifications 2. Helps achieve a more stable frame rate depending on the specific game and system so it seems its only there to prevent Windows from installing something and sending out the Restart Notification, while in Game
That was actually the purpose of the button, when turned off it'd massively slow down your machine, so that you could run older software that relied on the speed of older CPU's for timing. This wouldn't happen with Half Life, because this was a solved problem by then, but imagine the original Half Life was designed to run at 60fps on the CPU's of the time, but you try to run it on a modern PC and all of a sudden everything in the game is sped up 10 times because you can now run it at 600fps, rendering it unplayable.
2:05 While I get that both RTX 3060 & 32 GB of DDR4 aren't exactly expensive nowadays, it's funny that you say a PC with a combined RAM & VRAM large enough to fit AAA games of yesteryear entirely is 'midrange'.
To be completely honest his kind of benchmarks are not the way to test this feature since is prone to human error, one time you look slightly more to a section of the map that is heavier and maybe the next to a portion that is lighter or you don't hit the same exact spots or interactive objects and you gonna get what you got, the same performance on both just with eventualities that placebo to any direction, the best way would be to do it in games that have an actual benchmark mode, or to stick to cinematics that will render the exact same stuff so you can objectively see the difference, also do it on a clean pc with no bloatware or active background tasks.
I'd be interested to see latency numbers here. Even with a high end system there *should* be slight improvements that aren't captured by comparing the FPS data alone.
The other thing that is so important for professional gamer is mouse delay , I tested game mode on and of in resident evil 4 remake and when I turned it one my mouse movements got delay 😂 but when I turned it of there was no delays as you think it changed your hz from 60 to 90 , that's insane
What game engine does "Deliver us the Moon" use? Unity? I think a lot of games, depending on their 3D Engine (Unity, Source, Unreal, Rage, etc) are effected by game mode, whatever it's actually doing. Also can you confirm that whatever game mode is doing is consistent between each game you test? What is it doing anyway?
Been following your channel for a long while Using a xeon 2699 v3 with win11 pro (All core turbo mod and mod bios to remove the tdp limit) Runs like a dream
I'm thinking all the bloatware that eventually builds up on a system after a few months usage is what 'Game Mode' helps disable and prevent from sapping CPU and GPU cycles... with a new install, there's really nothing for it to work on. Didn't do any research, so forgive my ignorance if I'm way off - this is just an edumacatededed guess as a life-long network engineer and IT person.
i had horrible input lag and lower frames when watching videos recently after a windows update, surprisingly game mode fixed everything, no idea why, since before i needed it to be off for better frames and input lag
I wonder how it would do with the lower spec boot settings and say a gtx970? That would be more realistic. I think what has been proven here is the GPU makes way more difference that the CPU (or RAM to a certain extent) in gaming performance.
When you optimize your pc for game you don’t need to turn on the game mode I actually have etc 3050 ti 4g I was playing squad game but it was stuttering at low settings but when I turned off the game mode I got 16 fps more with smooth gameplay
When I have game mode on, when I do something like share my screen in Discord or have a video playing on RUclips, it makes my screen share or RUclips video super stuttery. I turn game mode off and everything is fine again.
Game mode sounds like that old trick you used to make windows 98 faster on slower machines.. change so the apps was working in the background instead of in the "main memory". It did help to lower ram usage but ram usage affect 0.00001% of the performance. The biggest improvements is gained from a good GPU/ SSD/m.2/ CPU and motherboard. The cooling have a semi big affect as well.. no heat = no clock reduction. Most motherboards will optimize the performance by default and run the computer at the best and most stable speed possible (noticed that when a motherboard "overclocked" my cpu when the watchdog was iffy, random crashes was a thing after that) But in todays computer where you have 16 Gb, 32 Gb, 500 Gb? Ram?! i dont think it will make that much of a difference if you relocate the ram usage and release more of the ram memory for the game if you have 16 Gb ram.. Windows use something like 1.5 Gb - 3-4Gb ram in stock mode (3-4 Gb ram if you use triple screen setup like i do). The worst i have pushed my windows 10 is 99% ram usage and it was a case of program crashing and semi heavy load (I dont know why it kicked up to 99% since it was a while ago) and all i felt was a half a second skip in the games at times.. My highest normal ram usage is 8-9 Gb .. not even close to 16.. Best game mode for windows is to uninstall all the bloat and block all automatic connections with a firewall, no random downloads or installs while you play a game and maximum performance. I play on linux that have all automatic features turned off and i have damn good performance even if i use a gtx 1070 .. You cant test windows and get reliable results since windows will throw in a background download and install while you test and start a few other features that do something that obscure the test results..
I have Windows 23h2 and the protection real time in windows security crashed and it won't turn on. I tried all the methods from the Microsoft website and any method on RUclips and it did not work. Do you have a useful solution?
Hey Rich, one question regarding Windows 10: is there a way to set up specific colums of information to be shown in File Manager's folders everytime? I happen to have to change them all the time because Windows change the ones I've enabled to the system default.
If you mean size, date and/or whatever columns changing? Go to File Explorer ->View->Options->change folder and search options->View->Apply to folders. If that doesn't work you must google "Disable Automatic Folder Type Discovery in Windows 10" which will require messing with the registry. If you don't know nothing about the registry stay away.
I use game mode all the time. I play a lot of war thunder and without game mode i usually get about 100 fps and with game mode i get about 120 fps. One time i somehow got 160 fps lol. I use laptop for 1200$, it has 16 gb ram and rtx 3060 and ryzen cpu.
my question is, will this difference change with difference resolution = .=? like 1080 vs 1440 vs 4k, i mean from my understand there higher the res, it will go toward gpu bound regardless of CPU/GPU spec doesn't matter what game, maybe game mode will act differently between the different res = .=????
I'm the person with almost 1k hours spent benchmarking because I don't trust a single source on the internet. Most of them aren't gamers and don't even test in the most demanding areas of games. Game benchmarks from channels like Hardware Unboxed or Gamers Nexus are prime examples of data you should take with a grain of salt, they are hardware benchmarks, not gaming benchmarks. Only good for ballpark figures at best. Props to you doing your own testing, 1% lows while gaming (Regular FPS drops, not loading lows) are your true locked framerate and I can't stress enough how important it is to lock your framerate to these numbers to avoid stuttering. Most gamers don't understand this and it's mind boggling. I would take a locked 30fps over a fluctuating 60-120fps every day of the week. I lock most of my games to 60fps now because from my findings, most games/engines aren't optimized for anything higher on the lows regardless of the hardware you throw at them.
Can you make a video for setting AMD ? i have AMD on my legion 7 laptop would be a lot of help! also should we always update our windows? in windows update? thanks alot
All of the Windows 11 gaming related features are tied to it, stuff like windowed mode optimization, AutoHDR, etc. The actual power mode that affects scheduling is actually the least important thing that Game Mode does. It's the umbrella stuff that's tied to it that you want, so you want to make sure your games are eligible for game mode in the first place, whether you use it or not. For all this to work, it's important to open the Xbox Game Bar and ensure that Windows even identifies what you're running as a game. For a lot of launch titles or non-AAA titles (and even some AAA titles, rofl), Windows doesn't know that what you're running is a game. Takes weeks or even months before Windows automatically identifies stuff as games and you'll need to manually click "Remember this is a Game".
@@MrGencyExit64 so its a "i feel good from enabling this feature, it says game mode".. similar to the turbo button, people pressed it since it said "turbo" and it was everything but turbo mode.. but the majority of the people did bet their children that the turbo button made everything go faster..
@@lokelaufeyson9931in case you're unaware, the purpose of the Turbo button was actually so that you could turn it off and run old software that ran too fast on the CPU's of the day. Like old games that didn't use timers, so the logic was frame rate dependent. Which made those games unplayable on CPU's that were orders of magnitude faster. The Turbo button on my old Pentium 60 if turned off, made it run at the speed of a 286 (I don't know which model of 286, I just specifically remember the motherboard manual specifying 286). You had to switch it before boot time though, otherwise it did absolutely nothing.
Win 10 uses 700MB of gpu memory when doing nothing. I would guess that it reduces that memory usage. It could be difference between memory related crashes and smooth gaming.
Okay so I have a question my pc is not working like it's suppose to, it keeps stating that OpenCl.dll is deleted or corrupted can I get some help, any advice on how to solve it?
Hello I need some help and would like to know If anybody can fix my issues. After using advast and having it update 17 outdated drivers I can no longer open my Obs studio without it crashing. I also can't update my windows either. I get a windows error code of update error 0x80070643 when trying to update also when I try to trouble shoot my obs studio I get a message saying OBS Failed to find locale/en-us.ini I wanna reinstall obs but I'm afraid of losing my data and it not working in the end.
Game Mode prolly only helps when you're cpu bottlenecked or the game and/or windows are on an HDD. No idea how you took the averages though, you would need to do multiple tests with the same settings, if you don't have proper benchmarks where stuff always stay the same.
It is not all that accurate if you turn game mode on but keep on recording with a recorder, since it takes lots of processing power on it when its turned on. The "game mode" regardless if its good or not won't know what to prioritize. Another weird ass programming in that mode is the inability of the system to understand what is the game that is running. To make sure its targeting the game, it needs to be on full-screen not window. I personally discourage using it either way.
setting cpu cores in msconfig doesn't do what u said. it just tells windows how many cores it has to use to boot up. in the old days (w7) it used to be good way to speed up booting times of windows on lower end machines, and honestly except u i haven't seen anyone recommending to disable gaming mode
My game mode always auto turns off even if i put it on. But yah frame times are not worth loosing even a single frame to get like a half or 1 fps more avarage xD Game Mode stays off. And for anyone with stuttering or recording stutter/dropped frames etc. TURN OFF Hardware Acceleration GPU Scheduling. It is normally on for a lot of people and causes nothing but pain and suffering for gaming and or encoding. Its a windows work boost feature but a game/recording/VR gaming killer. Never have it on...
I recommend a gaming pc as just a gaming pc install atlas remove edge browser install Opera run the installer 2 or 3 times to make shur it takes install gme version of video drivers debloat them. And all good If you only have 1 computer, do dual boot regular windows for everything, none gaming. I also install avg free driver updater and advanced system care enable ram cleaner and use nvme or ssd
In my end using an Asus tuf A17 laptop. Having "game mode" turned on, ignores set cpu clock speed that ive use on my power plan which i intentionally downclock so I'll get a better temps on cpu making my setting useless so I turned that off just for that reason.
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This is really timely. I was just in a reddit discussion with someone defending game mode as a benefit. Nice to see a methodical comparison. Thank you.
same here i watched a video someone posted trying to claim it was better but all i seen was higher cpu and gpu temps with it on then with it off lol sometimes a 15-20C temp difference
Thanks for doing these benchmarks. At least someone took the time to do this for us. Great video!
I was testing out the Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling (HAGS) setting along with Game Mode, but I only tested in Minecraft, with and without a shader mod (really impacts the performance) and the results were interesting...
Both HAGS and Game Mode on :
Without shaders : max. 1312 / avg. 1285 / min. 1243
With shaders : max. 208 / avg. 205 / min. 204
Both HAGS and Game Mode off :
Without shaders : max. 1382 / avg. 1363 / min. 1344
With shaders : max. 219 / avg. 215 / min. 214
Only Game mode on :
Without shaders : max. 1354 / avg. 1333 / min. 1233
With shaders : max. 217 / avg. 215 / min. 214
Only HAGS on :
Without shaders : max. 1443 / avg. 1416 / min. 1362
With shaders : max. 220 / avg. 218 / min. 217
The Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling was the winner. GPU and CPU usage stayed fairly the same throughout all tests, but game mode made the gpu% increase by quite a bit. I would love to see this being tested in other games too👍
I7 10700K (3.8 / 5.1 GHz)
RTX 3060 12Gb
MSI MPG Z490 GAMING PLUS
try something hard like rdr2 etc
@@sebysebyt12Minecraft using shaders can be way harder then rdr2. Ngl
@@sebysebyt12rdr2 isn’t a hard game to run bro
@penileymajorey7174 you know, emoji spamming makes you look real immature. And go test for yourself lol.
@penileymajorey7174 You should search "Destroying My RTX 4090 With Incredible Minecraft Graphics" and watch until the end of the video, some minecraft modifications will give you 5 fps even with the RTX 4090.
The game is heavily modifiable and it's possible to get 8k resource packs with ray-tracing for each pixel that makes any new game look "old".
It's not about competition on which game runs better, I was just commenting about something that could be potentially turned into a video.
This is a well-made video. FPS is easy to see and overall straightforward.
It's all within margin of error lol, it always felt like a placebo button.
reminds me of the "turbo button" on old PCs.. it did have a effect but not the one the text say..
they simply say fk pc players, just buy an xbox ...
@@ChrisGR93_TxS yea, its a sad world
Who needs a pc to play pc games on ultra settings,so fucking yesterday,such a waste of energy and money.
I use GFN for 2 years now,best i tried in 45years of gaming .
And i played ,tried and saw it all trust me 👍.
@@Mister_GreyGeforce now 😂😂 Your comment screams broke. Get a job, and earn a decent pc to play games on actually natively and not relying on streaming. It’s much better. 😂
Wow. I haven’t been on this channel in years, I’ve been subbed for years and i last saw you was on 10k, now almost 150k congrats!
I think Game Mode is for non-tweaked systems. If you already removed the bloatware, you optimize the power plan, unpark cores, have correct drivers in your system, etcetera, then i think Game mode could actually hurt performance more because it may try to "help" Windows when it doesn't need it anymore. I am gonna try with it off for a while.
yeah probably, i have it fully optimized i think i will keep it off
Seen much of a difference so far? Will try myself this week
@@easymoneeey I think it made The Witcher 3 stutter a hell of a lot less with Gamemode Off and using RivaTuner to lock the framerate to 60 fps to get correct framepacing. With Gamemode On, with any fps limiter from RivaTuner, the game would microstutter like crazy for any small action or sutff that happened on the screen, so my guess is that so far it's better off.
Didn't help there either in my experience. Difference on my partners laptop (who isn't a power gamer) was night and day, with turning it off making the games playable though the frame drops and freeze ups. Plus for multiplayer games on any system it's super bad, because it de-prioritise the network communication, leading to increase lag, system freezes and rubber banding, depending on how the games net code is written.
Rather than artificially downgrading I would like to see this using an older gen system, like a 2600k or a 4790k or whatever. Just something using an older architecture and doesnt have all the bells and whistles (althought the 4790k is still fairly beastly imo)
4790 is still a killer CPU, have a PC with the non k version and a GTX 1660 super.
@@viperdemonz-jenkins I have the same. Mine is a k though. I'm pretty happy with mine.
When you use Game Mode, Windows prioritizes your gaming experience by turning things off in the background. When you’re running a game, Game Mode:
Prevents Windows Update from performing driver installations and sending restart notifications
Helps achieve a more stable frame rate depending on the specific game and system
doesnt even do that tho@HazardXXX
@HazardXXX Now that you mention it I just remembered that I'm using ReviOS and it has windows update disabled by default (I can still enable it at any time). So I guess it's better to disable Game Mode since Win update won't even be active.
In other words, 'Game mode' does exactly the same as 'Focus assist'.
An awesome video as always . Keep up the good work :)
Idk if I am facing a placebo effect but I have noticed a pattern with the game mode on windows 11 (not sure about Win10 but I fear it will be the same or worse). What happens here with me is that on my current setup of i5 10400F with RTX 3060 12G (windows 11 of course and HAGS on or off didn't feel the difference but for me I kept it on) on cpu bound games game mode off seems to be working ideal and performing the best as it can and the difference margin is hugely noticeable but when it comes to gpu bound games, game mode on seems to take away the winning trophy. So with that being said, the conclusion for me on my system is:
CPU bound games = Game mode off
GPU bound games = Game mode on
This worked for me but I would love to see others test my theory as well and hoping to see good results.
My system: Core i5 10400F 6c/12t paired with Evga RTX 3060 12G OC equipped on Msi B460m Mortar Wifi
Very interesting! I didn’t expect a negative affect from game mode but I will still try to see if it works for my pc or not
But it’s to stop pop ups and updates from kicking in as well ( if you haven’t set up your update times, like most people don’t). Enjoy your system notifications popping up in game if you turn it off.
GPU scheduling on or off during your testing? Also, in game mode you should go through and make sure that the games you are testing are all set to High Performance (Do not use Let Windows Decide), Don't use optimizations for windowed games and Don't use Auto HDR are both CHECKED and you run all games in Full Screen mode when testing. Under System>Display>Graphics>Default graphics settings: Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling should be on (If your system can handle it), Reduce Latency: ON and Auto HDR: Off. Those capable should also enable Resizable Bar with GPU Scheduling. Ultimately, Game Mode all depends on your hardware and whether or not you have done optimizations yourself on your system or not and whether you have streaming software running and a bunch of other factors. Ultimately, this is a setting that you should take the time and test yourself as all systems and setups will be different.
Lowering thresholds may not quite be enough unfortunately. Your clock speeds are still the same and that may actually matter more than core count (depending on the game). Also there wasn't a way to drop gpu performance if that matters for game mode.
Still probably doesn't help performance though lol.
"Game mode" is just a misnamed feature. It have nothing to do with gaming, it just simply disable notifications and other releated stuff that might hinder your gaming session. Nothing more.
When you use Game Mode, Windows prioritizes your gaming experience by turning things off in the background. When you’re running a game, Game Mode:
Prevents Windows Update from performing driver installations and sending restart notifications
Helps achieve a more stable frame rate depending on the specific game and system
I've used it personally and go from around 180fps in overwatch to around 240, and I've noticed good stability in games that previously had stability issues.
@@datgamerguy69 If you know what you are doing and where to touch you don't need it at all. There are plenty of paths to disable the windows update as a whole (as i have) and it wont do a thing on your system unless you re-enable it. And i am not talking about "pausing" it, but literally DISABLING it completly.
@@BryanTheFury if you know what you're doing. just turn game mode on and it does the same thing in a single switch LMAOOO i don't get your point you're just proving a more complex way
@@datgamerguy69 You didn't understood. I just said i disabled windows update for good. Game mode doesn't disable it, just pause it and all the actions he does but it is still running in background. You'll still have all the pack and the services running. Disabling it you can REMOVE those things and have less resource usage.
An awesome video as always sir, I always wanted to know if it really does makes a difference thank you
Running in game benchmarks.
I've suspected game mode is mainly used for the Intel p-cores and e-cores and I've heard it helps on Wndows 11 but most of the time you really don't need to use game mode.
It wouldn't make any obvious difference since you're running it on a system that doesn't really have anything running on the background.
A real test would be playing games while:
- Netflix is installed(along with its annoying notifications)
- discord
- Microsoft Teams
- Chrome
- A second monitor
- Maybe while streaming with OBS
Then run a test. Game mode minimizes resource allocation on other apps that aren't using more than sufficient D3D rendering in the system. This is how it knows you are playing games in the first place. So if you only literally have the game open on a fresh install, with no other apps/3rd party software running in the background, then this test is fruitless.
When you put it like that…
Good video. I always kept it off because I just debloat Windows 11 and that is my game mode lol
I thought all game mode did was shut down background stuff and updates while gaming..
its hard to impossible to know when you play a game, a game is a program like any other program.. how can you see that this specific load on the cpu is a game?
Turn off updates? impossible, MS wont allow you to do that.. never. MS wont allow anyone to have a chance to abuse that feature.
Shut down background stuff? no, microsoft will never allow the users to do that. It goes against microsoft policy.
I think game mode was designed for older or low end systems in mind, but I could be wrong. Might I suggest testing this with something like a dual or quad core CPU, 8gb or 16gb of ram and something like a gtx 1080, rx 470 or something that slighty struggles with todays games. Maybe the lower the system specs the better game mode works?
How about the hardware accelerated GPU scheduling ?
If your cpu isn't that great then have it On. It offloads some of the work from the cpu to your gpu.
I'm Brazilian, I think your content is incredible
1% isn't worth it IMO. beautiful video bud. thanks for the info on game mode. I've been thinking of turning it off lately and with your vid, i just made my decision.
Game mode reduces input lag but I dont know by how much. Its the time you push or click a button to your character taking an action. FPS is how many times the image is being drawn on screen per a second.
Game mode isn’t designed to increase frame rate. It’s to decrease latency in your controller input. With it off, your inputs via controller have a small lag, which in first person shooters makes a massive difference. Most notably this can really damage your ability to control recoil on some games, as the lag means you’re always slightly behind the bounce and wobble.
and it works the other way around, the enabled game mode gives a high input delay and a floating mouse.
@@alexandernazarov7636noticed this too
What a great question. Ryzen7 5800x, 32G Ram, 3070,standard settings, SSD. BF2042. Yup, runs faster fps with gaming mode off. Thanks.
I'm guessing a slow horse and a fast horse but tied up are not the same thing
On laptops it absolutely works. I have an MSI machine it its consistently better with game mode on. I mean every time. I think it stops the thermal throttling maybe. I haven't looked too deeply but it works every time. If you have an RTX laptop....try it.
Game Mode, Ahh the question that has been on every windows user minds since it was created. So what is game mode and what does it do? It allows all necessary resources to be priority of the game your playing. It stops WIndows Updates, virus scanner, and shuts startup menu items and puts them to sleep. It is like you are flying a space ship and your being chased by space pirates and you need to out run them so what do you do? You overclock your power by shutting down unnecessary resources so all power is routed to your ship. That is GAME MODE
The problem with competitive gaming is input lag, not FPS. You need to test process time, Latency GPU + CPU . I can have 5 more FPS, but with 1 ms of delay added.
Thanks for all your work to benchmark this! When I first read about Window's "game mode", I knew it was just a gimmick - since even games are dependent on the other, core services of the OS to run well. What happens when you take resources away from the code implementing your network stack in a multi-player game? Nothing good, that's for sure! My gaming rig is also my home media server, my security camera hub, my home backup server, my on-line backup server, hosting my daughter's small commercial web site, running BOINC with several "spare time" projects - all without missing a beat on a 10-year old, 3.3GHZ i7-5820k processor (6 cores/12 threads) with 32GB of main memory. If I throttled those other applications, it probably wouldn't even help my gaming much at all! More important than a buzz-word "gaming mode" is having a decent memory manager and scheduler in the OS, so all the ongoing workload is executed as fairly and rationally as possible!
game mode gets better the more stuff you run at the background in you game, as it give more priority for you game, but other than that no major difference.
I thought the MSconfig CPU setting only works for when windows boot, u think when you set it to 4 cores, then you only will see 4 cores in taskmgr,dont think so. and even for the memory when set to 8Gb, you still will have 32.
I didnt test this but just want to let you know.
I'd just be happy that it disables unnecessary updates etc when gaming
what does Game Mode do ? ( Source MS )
1. Prevents Windows Update from performing driver installations and sending restart notifications
2. Helps achieve a more stable frame rate depending on the specific game and system
so it seems its only there to prevent Windows from installing something and sending out the Restart Notification, while in Game
Yes, which is why this video is clickbait based on ignorance
@@christophervanzetta why does it cause some people stutters having it on then
I swear the "TURBO" button made the computer slower...
no, it made the computer faster. Trust me bro. Always enable the turbo button.
That was actually the purpose of the button, when turned off it'd massively slow down your machine, so that you could run older software that relied on the speed of older CPU's for timing.
This wouldn't happen with Half Life, because this was a solved problem by then, but imagine the original Half Life was designed to run at 60fps on the CPU's of the time, but you try to run it on a modern PC and all of a sudden everything in the game is sped up 10 times because you can now run it at 600fps, rendering it unplayable.
@@PandemonicHypercube do you say no to a challenge? :)
2:05 While I get that both RTX 3060 & 32 GB of DDR4 aren't exactly expensive nowadays, it's funny that you say a PC with a combined RAM & VRAM large enough to fit AAA games of yesteryear entirely is 'midrange'.
To be completely honest his kind of benchmarks are not the way to test this feature since is prone to human error, one time you look slightly more to a section of the map that is heavier and maybe the next to a portion that is lighter or you don't hit the same exact spots or interactive objects and you gonna get what you got, the same performance on both just with eventualities that placebo to any direction, the best way would be to do it in games that have an actual benchmark mode, or to stick to cinematics that will render the exact same stuff so you can objectively see the difference, also do it on a clean pc with no bloatware or active background tasks.
so that feature totally not for pro player to enable it
i just turn it off, thx for the video and comments are blow
I'd be interested to see latency numbers here. Even with a high end system there *should* be slight improvements that aren't captured by comparing the FPS data alone.
Overall it s better to keep it off for you r cpu sake 😂
And to think this useless and often FPS harming feature is enabled by default!
The other thing that is so important for professional gamer is mouse delay , I tested game mode on and of in resident evil 4 remake and when I turned it one my mouse movements got delay 😂 but when I turned it of there was no delays as you think it changed your hz from 60 to 90 , that's insane
Remember those apps you could download back in dial up days that claimed to increase your internet speed by like 5x or some bs. Game mode.
What game engine does "Deliver us the Moon" use? Unity? I think a lot of games, depending on their 3D Engine (Unity, Source, Unreal, Rage, etc) are effected by game mode, whatever it's actually doing. Also can you confirm that whatever game mode is doing is consistent between each game you test? What is it doing anyway?
It's Unreal Engine 4.
Been following your channel for a long while
Using a xeon 2699 v3 with win11 pro
(All core turbo mod and mod bios to remove the tdp limit)
Runs like a dream
bruu how u mod bios?
@@BeastMrBeef using an AMI bios editing tool then a tedious process of using freedos to flash the mod bios nothing crazy
On my system and playing Half Life Alyx I found if game mode on it often crashed the game, with off it rarely does.
video says, turn it off.
I'm thinking all the bloatware that eventually builds up on a system after a few months usage is what 'Game Mode' helps disable and prevent from sapping CPU and GPU cycles... with a new install, there's really nothing for it to work on. Didn't do any research, so forgive my ignorance if I'm way off - this is just an edumacatededed guess as a life-long network engineer and IT person.
is resizable bar still good? Is it still used?
yes, use it.
Was this tested on 23H2 or which version of W11?
i had horrible input lag and lower frames when watching videos recently after a windows update, surprisingly game mode fixed everything, no idea why, since before i needed it to be off for better frames and input lag
I wonder how it would do with the lower spec boot settings and say a gtx970? That would be more realistic. I think what has been proven here is the GPU makes way more difference that the CPU (or RAM to a certain extent) in gaming performance.
When you optimize your pc for game you don’t need to turn on the game mode I actually have etc 3050 ti 4g I was playing squad game but it was stuttering at low settings but when I turned off the game mode I got 16 fps more with smooth gameplay
I don't think it does anything at all unless the xbox game bar is also on. That being said, you're always better off disabling xbox gamebar.
Mid range? Bro thats a beast you have.
When I have game mode on, when I do something like share my screen in Discord or have a video playing on RUclips, it makes my screen share or RUclips video super stuttery. I turn game mode off and everything is fine again.
does this also happen with shadow play?
Should have tested Call of duty Warzone III.
I tested this on a actual low end rig, i5 7400 16gigs ddr4 and a 1060 gtx 3g, it made no noticeable gains.
Now do this with a CPU Bound and a GPU Bound system to see how it affects different setups.
Big ups for the modest specs
Game mode sounds like that old trick you used to make windows 98 faster on slower machines.. change so the apps was working in the background instead of in the "main memory".
It did help to lower ram usage but ram usage affect 0.00001% of the performance. The biggest improvements is gained from a good GPU/ SSD/m.2/ CPU and motherboard.
The cooling have a semi big affect as well.. no heat = no clock reduction.
Most motherboards will optimize the performance by default and run the computer at the best and most stable speed possible (noticed that when a motherboard "overclocked" my cpu when the watchdog was iffy, random crashes was a thing after that)
But in todays computer where you have 16 Gb, 32 Gb, 500 Gb? Ram?! i dont think it will make that much of a difference if you relocate the ram usage and release more of the ram memory for the game if you have 16 Gb ram.. Windows use something like 1.5 Gb - 3-4Gb ram in stock mode (3-4 Gb ram if you use triple screen setup like i do).
The worst i have pushed my windows 10 is 99% ram usage and it was a case of program crashing and semi heavy load (I dont know why it kicked up to 99% since it was a while ago) and all i felt was a half a second skip in the games at times..
My highest normal ram usage is 8-9 Gb .. not even close to 16..
Best game mode for windows is to uninstall all the bloat and block all automatic connections with a firewall, no random downloads or installs while you play a game and maximum performance.
I play on linux that have all automatic features turned off and i have damn good performance even if i use a gtx 1070 .. You cant test windows and get reliable results since windows will throw in a background download and install while you test and start a few other features that do something that obscure the test results..
my highest was 28 gb...... the game i was playing has a memory leak
@@V3RAC1TY a "small" memory leak? :)
You literally wrote a book to just boast about using Linux stfu bro
I have Windows 23h2 and the protection real time in windows security crashed and it won't turn on. I tried all the methods from the Microsoft website and any method on RUclips and it did not work. Do you have a useful solution?
Hey Rich, one question regarding Windows 10: is there a way to set up specific colums of information to be shown in File Manager's folders everytime? I happen to have to change them all the time because Windows change the ones I've enabled to the system default.
If you mean size, date and/or whatever columns changing? Go to File Explorer ->View->Options->change folder and search options->View->Apply to folders. If that doesn't work you must google "Disable Automatic Folder Type Discovery in Windows 10" which will require messing with the registry. If you don't know nothing about the registry stay away.
He maybe answer you if you send him money.Money talks
Thanks!
Thank you, appreciate it.
@@CyberCPU i subscribed your channel cuz you're professional in computer stuff like me and two you have nice Beard
I use game mode all the time.
I play a lot of war thunder and without game mode i usually get about 100 fps and with game mode i get about 120 fps. One time i somehow got 160 fps lol.
I use laptop for 1200$, it has 16 gb ram and rtx 3060 and ryzen cpu.
Game testing never seems to into MSFS 2020, its a shame as this will give a good system a proper test
my question is, will this difference change with difference resolution = .=?
like 1080 vs 1440 vs 4k, i mean from my understand there higher the res, it will go toward gpu bound regardless of CPU/GPU spec doesn't matter what game, maybe game mode will act differently between the different res = .=????
I'm the person with almost 1k hours spent benchmarking because I don't trust a single source on the internet. Most of them aren't gamers and don't even test in the most demanding areas of games. Game benchmarks from channels like Hardware Unboxed or Gamers Nexus are prime examples of data you should take with a grain of salt, they are hardware benchmarks, not gaming benchmarks. Only good for ballpark figures at best. Props to you doing your own testing, 1% lows while gaming (Regular FPS drops, not loading lows) are your true locked framerate and I can't stress enough how important it is to lock your framerate to these numbers to avoid stuttering. Most gamers don't understand this and it's mind boggling. I would take a locked 30fps over a fluctuating 60-120fps every day of the week. I lock most of my games to 60fps now because from my findings, most games/engines aren't optimized for anything higher on the lows regardless of the hardware you throw at them.
i think for better latency game mode on better than off ? thats why we get better fps while its off ?
Can you make a video for setting AMD ? i have AMD on my legion 7 laptop
would be a lot of help! also should we always update our windows? in windows update? thanks alot
TLDR - All these results are within margin of error. Game mode does nothing.
Thanks, I finally know! I will be switching off from now on! Great videos, very helpful and easy to follow!
What is game mode actually do then. I meant who will need to have it on if not for performance. Does it do anything else
If game mode doesn't make a significant difference it must have a different purpose otherwise why would you even bother to have game mode?
Who knows, maybe some devs in the comments will know what it actually does.
All of the Windows 11 gaming related features are tied to it, stuff like windowed mode optimization, AutoHDR, etc.
The actual power mode that affects scheduling is actually the least important thing that Game Mode does. It's the umbrella stuff that's tied to it that you want, so you want to make sure your games are eligible for game mode in the first place, whether you use it or not.
For all this to work, it's important to open the Xbox Game Bar and ensure that Windows even identifies what you're running as a game. For a lot of launch titles or non-AAA titles (and even some AAA titles, rofl), Windows doesn't know that what you're running is a game. Takes weeks or even months before Windows automatically identifies stuff as games and you'll need to manually click "Remember this is a Game".
@@MrGencyExit64 so its a "i feel good from enabling this feature, it says game mode".. similar to the turbo button, people pressed it since it said "turbo" and it was everything but turbo mode.. but the majority of the people did bet their children that the turbo button made everything go faster..
@@lokelaufeyson9931in case you're unaware, the purpose of the Turbo button was actually so that you could turn it off and run old software that ran too fast on the CPU's of the day.
Like old games that didn't use timers, so the logic was frame rate dependent. Which made those games unplayable on CPU's that were orders of magnitude faster.
The Turbo button on my old Pentium 60 if turned off, made it run at the speed of a 286 (I don't know which model of 286, I just specifically remember the motherboard manual specifying 286). You had to switch it before boot time though, otherwise it did absolutely nothing.
@@PandemonicHypercube yea, the turbo button was the first technical irony
bro I didnt know I had it on until i stated thinking about it and saw this video so thanks also my first video
Win 10 uses 700MB of gpu memory when doing nothing. I would guess that it reduces that memory usage. It could be difference between memory related crashes and smooth gaming.
Okay so I have a question my pc is not working like it's suppose to, it keeps stating that OpenCl.dll is deleted or corrupted can I get some help, any advice on how to solve it?
Hello I need some help and would like to know If anybody can fix my issues. After using advast and having it update 17 outdated drivers I can no longer open my Obs studio without it crashing. I also can't update my windows either. I get a windows error code of update error 0x80070643 when trying to update also when I try to trouble shoot my obs studio I get a message saying OBS Failed to find locale/en-us.ini I wanna reinstall obs but I'm afraid of losing my data and it not working in the end.
Game Mode prolly only helps when you're cpu bottlenecked or the game and/or windows are on an HDD.
No idea how you took the averages though, you would need to do multiple tests with the same settings, if you don't have proper benchmarks where stuff always stay the same.
I would really like to know what game mode does what processes it turns off or on
you look like your gpu limited in your testing. what resolution were you trying to benchmark a 3060 at?
Game Mode - synonymous with Snake Oil I reckon ! Much like Registry Cleaners.
It is not all that accurate if you turn game mode on but keep on recording with a recorder, since it takes lots of processing power on it when its turned on. The "game mode" regardless if its good or not won't know what to prioritize. Another weird ass programming in that mode is the inability of the system to understand what is the game that is running. To make sure its targeting the game, it needs to be on full-screen not window. I personally discourage using it either way.
setting cpu cores in msconfig doesn't do what u said. it just tells windows how many cores it has to use to boot up. in the old days (w7) it used to be good way to speed up booting times of windows on lower end machines, and honestly except u i haven't seen anyone recommending to disable gaming mode
My game mode always auto turns off even if i put it on. But yah frame times are not worth loosing even a single frame to get like a half or 1 fps more avarage xD
Game Mode stays off.
And for anyone with stuttering or recording stutter/dropped frames etc. TURN OFF Hardware Acceleration GPU Scheduling. It is normally on for a lot of people and causes nothing but pain and suffering for gaming and or encoding. Its a windows work boost feature but a game/recording/VR gaming killer.
Never have it on...
What I’ve noticed is with game mode off there tends to be bigger latency than it on
I recommend a gaming pc as just a gaming pc install atlas remove edge browser install Opera run the installer 2 or 3 times to make shur it takes install gme version of video drivers debloat them. And all good
If you only have 1 computer, do dual boot regular windows for everything, none gaming. I also install avg free driver updater and advanced system care enable ram cleaner and use nvme or ssd
great video
8:43 Isnt that only for the boot of the system?
In my end using an Asus tuf A17 laptop. Having "game mode" turned on, ignores set cpu clock speed that ive use on my power plan which i intentionally downclock so I'll get a better temps on cpu making my setting useless so I turned that off just for that reason.
There's not much difference. It depends on the game imo. So I opted to remain game mode to ON. You'll never notice 1FPS difference tho.
You will notice windows updates while gaming if it's turned off though... Always have it on.
how does windows know its a game vs some program?
the video we needed
All game mode really does is make it so windows isnt checking for available updates while an application is running.
just a thought . i hear and seen (cause i playing it)Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is having pc performance issues. Game mode maybe?though
What about Hardware accelerating gpu scheduling?