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[Kaako]

Oh my god. :O
These I7+1080 benches are disgusting.

 

[godhandiscen]

Dang.

Hopefully it improves in the future. The concept of freeing up resources for games makes sense.

 

[K.Jack]

I'm really curious for more tests, which have i5s paired with cards weaker than the 1060.

i5 + 1060 got a boost, but i3 + 1050 Ti got crushed. I don't get it.

Dang.

Hopefully it improves in the future. The concept of freeing up resources for games makes sense.

Windows already does a pretty damn good job of that.

 

[Miniature Kaiju]

So, not only CU broke a lot of shit, but the marquee feature for the update is virtually garbage. Way to go, Microsoft.

 

[BleedOrange]

Well expected.

Like the actual UWP games... it is a mess.

??? Gears 4 is fine?

 

[I'm new be nice]

"It seems a little strange to me to be calling them poison when they are literally the creators of the entire OS that houses such a prosperous library, though.

It's just such a large company that it's impossible for them to keep consistency across the entire spectrum of what they do."


When almost every gaming initiative (I'll give them credit for pushing standardized gamepad implementation) they've pushed on the platform since 2006 has been the hottest of garbage, poison is apt.

I'm not defending GFWs or any other half-baked store front they've lazily thrown together, but DirectX seems to be generally well respected, no?

If the open source alternative were truly better I'd have to wonder why it's not used more often.

 

[ChaosShadow]

I'm really curious for more tests, which have i5s paired with cards weaker than the 1060.

i5 + 1060 got a boost, but i3 + 1050 Ti got crushed. I don't get it.


Windows already does a pretty damn good job of that.

It really depends on how windows is splitting the threads. I don't know off the top of my head, but assume that with 4 available threads to the system, Windows splits it 3game - 1 background reserved (I don't know how it actually splits).

With an i5 you have 4 beefy threads, as each corresponds to its own physical core. That gives you 3 cores for game work and 1 core for background work, if a game is not heavily multi threaded and background tasks were eating into the usage, it could theoretically net a gain, or at the least not a loss.

With an i3, you still have 4 threads, but 2 of them are logical threads, meaning they're only there due to hyper threading, they still use part of that physical core. If windows tries to split this into a 3-1 and there is still background processes using CPU power (there always is) you have 2 threads corresponding to 1 beefy core, and a thread that is contending with background processes for CPU time, this could lead to a loss in performance.

This is assuming its by thread amount, if its by physical cores... then it would be stupid of it to do 1 core game 1 core background... but seeing how the feature was rolled it, i wouldn't put it past them.

 

[Coriolanus]

??? Gears 4 is fine?

sorta. i've had it installed since november 16. In that period, the game jumped from an already grotesque 80gb to an absolutely ridiculous 116gb. Windows store will update that monstrosity without asking for permission or mentioning that it is leeching bandwidth. Quite annoying.

 

[therealbigrich]

It should work but since it doesn't it really isn't that big of a deal either way. Its not like its mandatory and you cant turn it off .

 

[PaulloDEC]

So should we all be going into Settings and disabling this? Or are we expecting it to be addressed in the very near future?

 

[zMiiChy-]

Spoiler

Fuck Windows 10. Piece of shit malware disguised as software.

Agreed.
Only Vista was worse.

 

[Mass Effect]

If you watch the video the conclusion isn't "bullshit." More that it has a very limited use case and doesn't really impact most people in a negative or positive way. But the topic wouldn't get much discussion with boring results like that.

So it's useless at best, detrimental at worst.

Sounds like bullshit to me.

And his conclusion is that they found it to be not worth it, saying that maybe, in very certain hardware combos, there can be some benefit, but they couldn't find it.

 

[PastorOfMuppets]

How is it that every single Microsoft gaming initiative on the PC since the Xbox360 era has been such a colossal failure except for standardizing controllers?

Remember:

• Tray and play (making installations optional, just put in the discs and play)
• Games for Windows Live: Now you can pay for Xbox Live on your PC!
• Crossplatform Multiplayer - Only implemented by Shadowrun
• Games for Windows Store
• Shutting down Ensemble, Flight Simulator Team and selling off all their PC franchises

That shit was is nearing 10 years old now and they're still repeating the same mistakes with Windows 10's various gaming initiatives.

 

[roMonster]

It seems a little strange to me to be calling them poison when they are literally the creators of the entire OS that houses such a prosperous library, though.

It's just such a large company that it's impossible for them to keep consistency across the entire spectrum of what they do.

MS is PC gamings dead beat dad. They may have helped birth it and been there early but goddamn if they dont comeback every so often and fuck everything up.

 

[Jedi2016]

I don't know if it's actually as bad as what's in the OP across all titles and systems, but from another report I saw a couple weeks ago, the most common result was no change at all. The highest improvement was just a few frames... you can get more than that by tweaking the graphics settings. And yeah, a few games dropped performance, but not as much as in the OP.

I'm assuming this is something we can disable, right? Wouldn't put it past them to try to hardcode it into the OS, to be honest.

 

[whalleywhat]

What are they doing??

MS is PC gamings dead beat dad. They may have helped birth it and been there early but goddamn if they dont comeback every so often and fuck everything up.

lol

 

[ethomaz]

??? Gears 4 is fine?

You meant the game is playable with all the UWP's issues... yes... that didn't make the UWP less of a mess.

 

[PleaseDontBanMe]

You can't make this stuff up

 

[erawsd]

How is it that every single Microsoft gaming initiative on the PC since the Xbox360 era has been such a colossal failure except for standardizing controllers?

Remember:

• Tray and play (making installations optional, just put in the discs and play)
• Games for Windows Live: Now you can pay for Xbox Live on your PC!
• Crossplatform Multiplayer - Only implemented by Shadowrun
• Games for Windows Store
• Shutting down Ensemble, Flight Simulator Team and selling off all their PC franchises

That shit was is nearing 10 years old now and they're still repeating the same mistakes with Windows 10's various gaming initiatives.

Thats because nothing is a genuine attempt to improve PC Gaming, its all about making PC games more like an Xbox. Even this game mode is something MS credits to their experience from working on Xbox.

 

[Juice]

I think this is sarcasm...Right?

macOS is still losing 30-50% of a GPUs performance over Windows, not in a wrapper, but in native games. Even when Microsoft is breaking things, that performance gap isn't nullified.

So they have Metal, but AAA games don't seem to be using it, while their 6 year old OpenGL version is one of the highest overhead graphics APIs on modern platforms.


I'm one of those rare dudes gaming on a 15" rMBP too, but I always go to Boot Camp to do so. Even DX11 wipes the floor with the same hardware on macOS.

Same. Ancient OpenGL, GPU-thirsty macOS, and years-old graphics drivers mean I basically only play ancient games and 2D stuff under macOS. The only thing that fares well are Blizzard stuff, pound for pound

 

[AcceptableGhost]

If you see any PC gaming initiative from Microsoft in Windows 10, run far far away. Turn off the game bar and game mode ASAP.

MS is PC gamings dead beat dad. They may have helped birth it and been there early but goddamn if they dont comeback every so often and fuck everything up.

This is pretty accurate.

 

[funkystudent]

MS sucks at anything to do with pc gaming but seriously, how did they mess this one up?
AT BEST I expected an almost unnoticeable improvment but to actually do the opposite and make things worse is quite impressive.

 

[FIREKNIGHT2029]

Embarrassing.

 

[Htown]

How is it that every single Microsoft gaming initiative on the PC since the Xbox360 era has been such a colossal failure except for standardizing controllers?

Remember:

• Tray and play (making installations optional, just put in the discs and play)
• Games for Windows Live: Now you can pay for Xbox Live on your PC!
• Crossplatform Multiplayer - Only implemented by Shadowrun
• Games for Windows Store
• Shutting down Ensemble, Flight Simulator Team and selling off all their PC franchises

That shit was is nearing 10 years old now and they're still repeating the same mistakes with Windows 10's various gaming initiatives.

damn, I completely forgot about tray and play, lol

 

[Orca]

How do the minimums drop THAT much, but the average framerate doesn't drop much at all or improves slightly?

 

[AirPowerFTW]

People DO understand that Microsoft has some of the smartest graphics programmers IN THE WORLD. We CREATED DirectX, the standard API’s that everyone programs against. So while people laude PC Gamers for their HW skills, do you really think we don’t know how to build a system optimized for maximizing graphics for programmers? Seriously? There is no way we’re giving up a 30%+ advantage to a bog standard windows install.

 

[hirokazu]

So Game Mode aims to make gaming on Windows match the experience of gaming on a Mac?

 

[Hakkelus]

How is this even possible? Honestly, I just don't get it.

 

[Elsolar]

How is this even possible? Honestly, I just don't get it.

My guess is that in this case, the simplest explanation is the correct one: The "Game Mode" is some background thread attached to the game process which, by nature of existing, consumes clock cycles (and, more importantly, cache space), thus slowing down the game. It's interesting to note that Game Mode doesn't seem to affect average frame times nearly as much as minimum frame times. This implies that whatever thread is running the Game Mode "wakes up" every so often in order to do... whatever it is that it's supposed to be doing (I'm guessing run analytics and adjust the priority of other system threads), thus pulling the OS's focus away from the actual game code and delaying the next frame.

It's pretty incredible that this "feature" does the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do. PC games are really fast these days, like in the average case the overhead of a PC OS is only negligibly higher than that of consoles. The biggest unsolved problem right now in high-performance PC gaming is worst-case frame times. Every once in a while the OS will take control away from the game code in order to run some house cleaning, which can cause occasional, momentary fluctuations in performance that don't happen in well-designed console games. One would assume that a feature in an OS labeled "Game Mode" would aim to fix this issue, but apparently it actually makes this problem worse. Which leads to the question... what does it do? My guess is that it's supposed to give an appreciable boost to average-case frame times, but it seems like it fails to do even that. So who can say for sure? Probably only Microsoft at this point.

 

[cripterion]

I instantly took it off after the update. In my opinion MS has sucked all this gen, but I'd hope they at least try to stop polluting pc environment with their bullshit.

 

[Mandoric]

My guess is that in this case, the simplest explanation is the correct one: The "Game Mode" is some background thread attached to the game process which, by nature of existing, consumes clock cycles (and, more importantly, cache space), thus slowing down the game. It's interesting to note that Game Mode doesn't seem to affect average frame times nearly as much as minimum frame times. This implies that whatever thread is running the Game Mode "wakes up" every so often in order to do... whatever it is that it's supposed to be doing (I'm guessing run analytics and adjust the priority of other system threads), thus pulling the OS's focus away from the actual game code and delaying the next frame.

It's pretty incredible that this "feature" does the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do. PC games are really fast these days, like in the average case the overhead of a PC OS is only negligibly higher than that of consoles. The biggest unsolved problem right now in high-performance PC gaming is worst-case frame times. Every once in a while the OS will take control away from the game code in order to run some house cleaning, which can cause occasional, momentary fluctuations in performance that don't happen in well-designed console games. One would assume that a feature in an OS labeled "Game Mode" would aim to fix this issue, but apparently it actually makes this problem worse. Which leads to the question... what does it do? My guess is that it's supposed to give an appreciable boost to average-case frame times, but it seems like it fails to do even that. So who can say for sure? Probably only Microsoft at this point.

That's overcomplicated tbh? It smells like just reserving say 7/8 of cpu for the game and 1/8 for other processes through strict and severe thread affinity, which simultaneously doesn't help most gaming rigs (it's rare for background processes to want anywhere near that much) while also hurting them in performance troughs (that last 12.5% is hard reserved for other shit, unlike the status quo where a game can at least fight for all resources).

 

[GameAddict411]

It's pretty useless in it's current conditions. The good thing is that since Windows 7 resource management have been great on the OS side. I would worry about resource management if you keep your system clean in term of software wise. I think it might improve in the future, but I think most games have other limiting factors.

 

[Maximo]

So its useless whats the point of it for Microsoft to somehow mine more Data off you?

 

[zoobzone]

This is true and is no joke.
I get massive stutters with game mode on, the game mode is pure garbage.

 

[GameAddict411]

This is true and is no joke.
I get massive stutters with game mode on, the game mode is pure garbage.

How many CPU cores do you have? Just out of curiosity. I heard that it reserves CPU threads or cores in some cases as well. It might be causing the stuttering.

 

[GameAddict411]

People DO understand that Microsoft has some of the smartest graphics programmers IN THE WORLD. We CREATED DirectX, the standard API’s that everyone programs against. So while people laude PC Gamers for their HW skills, do you really think we don’t know how to build a system optimized for maximizing graphics for programmers? Seriously? There is no way we’re giving up a 30%+ advantage to a bog standard windows install.

Oh, this takes me back in time when MS was viciously shooting itself in face for a few months after the reveal of the Xbox One. Good times.

 

[Mandoric]

So its useless whats the point of it for Microsoft to somehow mine more Data off you?

The implementation seems like it would be genuinely nice for the specific scenario of hi-spec game on overloaded toaster. Just woefully misguided in that that's an incredibly-rare scenario, toaster owners are just gonna play on their PS4 instead and most games are low-spec anyway.

 

[akira28]

we can't be that upset with Microsoft. they're basically providing a free service now. All we can really do is be patient and wait. Hopefully they fix something.

 

[Grim Patron]

So its useless whats the point of it for Microsoft to somehow mine more Data off you?

The greatest OS for gaming!

 

[Shin-Ra]

Did DX12 free up enough resources on the same hardware to enable those Deus Ex improvements Microsoft advertised?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1193611

Microsoft took the trailer down but at least we still have this!

edit: Found one re-upload.

 

[longdi]

So do i have to turn it off? Don't tell me its on by default and it fucks up those who don't know better?

 

[00ich]

Did DX12 free up enough resources on the same hardware to enable those Deus Ex improvements Microsoft advertised?

what would that be? a saturation slider?

After Quantum Break there's little hope left for a mighty Xbox/Uwp axis in game development. That title performed better under Dx11 than 12.

 

[GhostTrick]

I liked it better when MS stopped caring about pc gaming. Good thing it's optional though.

 

[Sad Affleck]

I wonder what causes the disparity in the results. Why would the i5 system receive a boost and the other two a drop in Gears of War?

 

[TBiddy]

I wonder how Linus Tech Tips managed to create (or find, rather) such a huge difference, when everyone else saw little to no difference in their testing?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/13/windows-10-game-mode-review/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3187...akes-unplayable-games-playable-sometimes.html

Also this:

 

[meirl]

I wonder how Linus Tech Tips managed to create (or find, rather) such a huge difference, when everyone else saw little to no difference in their testing?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/13/windows-10-game-mode-review/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3187...akes-unplayable-games-playable-sometimes.html

Also this:

Maybe because clickbait? I mean someone created a thread Just because of this article and linked directly to it. Gives them a Lot of clicks, altough the article is bullshit.

 

[Vuze]

So do i have to turn it off? Don't tell me its on by default and it fucks up those who don't know better?

I'm pretty sure it's opt in.

That being said, I wish they would fix what actually matters and that is their Xbox One Wireless adapter driver which is fucked for me and a lot of other people since the anniversary update. It's basically impossible to use the pad wireless for longer than a few minutes before it disconnects and can't be reconnected until next reboot. It's unbelievable it wasn't fixed in the creator update. I'm tired of reporting the issue with all the evidence and description.

 

[Ploid 3.0]

There was a thread on gaf, I saw this video and tested it for myself (I always had it on). I gained slight performance (AMD card, he didn't check Ryzen or AMD card). Your mileage may vary depending on hardware. AMD had drivers for creators update, I suppose Nvidia did too but who knows, maybe AMD stuff could get more use out of it somehow.

Very slight improvement, margin of error slight, I didn't test much but some benchmarks though.

System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (6.2, Build 9200) (15063.rs2_release.170317-1834)
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7500 CPU @ 3.40GHz
8149.703MB
Radeon (TM) RX 480 Graphics (VRAM 8140 MB)


Link = Gaf Thread from
Member: dr_rus
(04-13-2017, 01:57 PM)
Windows 10 Creators Update Game Mode investigation and benchmarks

I think this person did a more extensive report on this. Looking back over the thread, I'm sure he did.

 

[Bl@de]

The update also broke G-Sync. Well played Microsoft.

Good to know. Will definetly not force the update myself and wait as long as I can. Windows 10 updates are just a pain in the arse. Last time Xbox One Controller support was broken and now this ... Oh how I wish for Vulkan+Linux support for 99% of the games

 

[xenorevlis]

Not sure if mentioned yet but this along with the "invisible" updates that prepped computers to get Creation update has heavily impacted apps like Open Broadcasting Software which many people use to record or stream games. It's causing all sorts of encoding bottlenecks.