What software shows you this info btw? RivaTuner + Afterburner?
Yes, that looks like the latest Afterburner/RTSS beta to me.
It's very customizable, and what I use to display things like frametime and GPU usage graphs.
Game Mode actually limits the amount of physical and logical threads the game can use - "reserving" other threads for the OS. IMO; unless you have some very intensive 2-4 thread background tasks running while gaming (I am not sure why you would at all), or for some reason have a game that is purely single threaded and you want to ensure no other applicaion touches its thread, then you should probably always leave Game Mode off.
While it prevents background applications running anything on the reserved 3/4 of the CPU, what seems to happen is that it moves most of the game's kernel-mode work to the first 1/4 of the CPU, while the user-mode work is moved to the remaining 3/4.
If I set the affinity to CPU15 only and enable Game Mode,
there's still kernel-mode work (red) running on the first four cores, rather than preventing the game running anything on that part of the CPU.
It also seems possible for Game Mode to be bypassed under certain conditions.
This is with Game Mode enabled, yet Forza has placed a lot of work on the first four cores. That's why I also have to set the process affinity to remove it from the first 1/4 of the cores to eliminate most of the stuttering.
I agree that Game Mode in its current state is not something to be enabled at all times, but I don't think it should always be disabled, and it's not only for low core-count CPUs.
Having a portion of the CPU reserved explicitly for the game is a great thing.
The way I understand it is that this 100% core does some things related to input (and core gameplay/physics ?), but it's light enough to not use 100% of the core, but they need to "fill" the core so it does not throttle down.
It's a nice theory, but it does seem to be the cause of the stuttering for me.
Forcing it to spread that CPU usage across multiple cores by enabling Game Mode and setting the process affinity so that Forza is removed from the first 1/4 of the available cores eliminates most of the really bad performance - though not all of the stuttering.
It seemed to work for Xyber too.
Now with the game mode, if I play a game while encoding, if the game has the focus, the x264 process only get to use one core, and if I told Windows that Elite Dangerous was not a game, x264 could use the 12 cores again.
Are you running the Insider Preview rather than the Creators Update?
With a 12 core CPU, it should be moving background processes to 1/4 of the CPU - 3 cores, not 1.
I know that the Fall Creators Update is supposed to change this behavior, though I'd be surprised if they changed it so that background processes are moved to a single core regardless of how many cores you have. At least I hope that's not what they did. Perhaps it's something like 1/8 and rounds down.
I've found that if the 1/4 reserved for background processes has all cores running at 100%, it can be enough to prevent interrupts being processed and causes the mouse to lag really badly - even if the CPU itself is not running at 100%.
Reducing the number of cores which are reserved for background processes increases the likelihood of that happening, but hopefully they have considered that.
The thread title needs changing or locking, they said the forum person got it wrong. Its not locked per core.
It's not locked to a single core, but it does do most of its work on a single thread if you have 8 cores or fewer, or two threads if you have more than 8 cores.
Technically, it's doing work on 31 threads here (of 90 total), but only a handful are doing real work and it's mainly running on two of them.
Since I have an 8c/16t CPU, one core working at 100% is "6.25% CPU". So everything other than the first two threads is running below 25% usage on a single core. Total CPU usage is ~18%.
