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[Guilty_AI]

With all the people talking about how great of a feature Quick Resume is on the XSX, i was curious and decided to do some research to see if there was some way to reproduce that on PC.
Surprisingly, i found the answer really quickly on a thread in the pcgaming sub. The user upload this video demonstrating how he did it.

Basically you open the Task Manager, go to performance tab and click on "open resource manager".
There, inside the CPU tab, right click the process of the game you're playing and click on suspend proccess.

Naturally i tested it myself, and it worked.
I was able to open not two but even three games at once (No Mans Sky, Yakuza 0 and Wreckfest. All on 1080p high/ultra) (my system is a GTX 1070 + i5 4690k + 16gb RAM)
They all ran fine, both when running with other games suspended or when restarted. The only abnormality I noticed is that when playing Wreckfest (with the two other games suspended), there would be micro-freezes when opening or closing menus.
Aside from that, i noticed as slighly higher GPU temperature than that of idle when i was with 2 games suspended on the background, although that could've been simply because i was running a game just moments before.
Other issue is that, any game that displays abnormal behaviour when minimized (or doesn't minimize properly at all) will naturally give some trouble when trying to use this "feature".

So, would i recommend it? I don't know, its not something i'm particularly interested in so i don't have the motivation to do further testing and see how it behaves, such as in what happens if you leave the games suspended for long periods of time, or what happens if you both suspend games along with hibernating your PC. However, if theres anyone playing on a PC who thinks this would be useful for them, feel free to do some more testing and share your results.

 

[notseqi]

Not much work for a feature many people seem to value, probably automatable through a small program aswell.
I don't usually jump from game to game and in the few instances I did I just left both games open with only a minor performance hit.

 

[petran79]

Unencrypted savegames and cheat engine are more usefull than Quick resume

 

[Raonak]

Very neat, did not know that was possible

 

[ReBurn]

What happens when you reboot your pc?

 

[EverydayBeast]

Consoles are centered around changing games, PC just kinda jokingly does it.

 

[Guilty_AI]

What happens when you reboot your pc?

Probably would close it all as with any other process.
It'd be more interesting to know what happens if you put your PC on sleep mode.

 

[Deleted member 801069]

Probably would close it all as with any other process.

it’s pretty neat that it still works on xsx even when you turn the console off or restart it

 

[GaviotaGrande]

it’s pretty neat that it still works on xsx even when you turn the console off or restart it

It saves virtual state of the game on SSD. That's why you're left with few GB out of that 1TB drive.

 

[Deleted member 801069]

It saves virtual state of the game on SSD. That's why you're left with few GB out of that 1TB drive.

I still have tons of space. And I’m playing like 5 games

 

[martino]

It saves virtual state of the game on SSD. That's why you're left with few GB out of that 1TB drive.

it's also why it's near instant on pc.
no saving and loading state from ssd.
And this is what can make it worth it imo unlike this demo (even i don't have personnal use of it)

 

[Guilty_AI]

It saves virtual state of the game on SSD. That's why you're left with few GB out of that 1TB drive.

It'd be neat to have this implemented for PC's too, although i'd much rather more devs just implemented quick save on their games.

 

[Mistershine.]

Does this free up ram or leave the suspended software I'm place but paused?

 

[Guilty_AI]

Does this free up ram or leave the suspended software I'm place but paused?

I haven't checked the exact usage, but i did manage to leave 3 games that require 8GB RAM running on 16GB (with isn't even the full 16GB because of windows).
But it should be interesting to see it so i'll run some tests.

EDIT: Just did and it does indeed still uses the RAM. But the games is only using part of the required memory at a time. NMS which was the heaviest of the ones i tested for example is using 4.5 gb right now (it requires 8 as a minimum), Yakuza 0 was only using around 500mb. All in all, it should be feasible with 2 or 3 games at a time, and if you have 32GB RAM available (which isn't that uncommon for PC players) its basically a walk in the park.

 

[petran79]

Consoles are centered around changing games, PC just kinda jokingly does it.

One reason consoles became PCs

 

[ReBurn]

it's also why it's near instant on pc.
no saving and loading state from ssd.
And this is what can make it worth it imo unlike this demo (even i don't have personnal use of it)

When you suspend a process on PC it may move what's in RAM for the suspended process to the page file depending on how much RAM is available for whichever processes are started when the other process is suspended. So it may be saving the state to SSD if Windows is managing the page file on an SSD. I wouldn't expect that everyone who does this is going to get the same instant performance as seen in the video but it's still probably going to be faster than booting the game fresh.

 

[Onironauta]

It's not really quick resume if it does not free up the RAM

 

[diffusionx]

MS should build the feature into the Xbox Game Bar more comprehensively. Considering Xbox OS is literally Windows 10, it should not be a big stretch.

 

[Fahdis]

What happens when you reboot your pc?

Do you quick resume after going to sleep?

 

[Guilty_AI]

It's not really quick resume if it does not free up the RAM

Well, it still has a similar effect so i think its fair to call it quick resume.

 

[Guilty_AI]

MS should build the feature into the Xbox Game Bar more comprehensively. Considering Xbox OS is literally Windows 10, it should not be a big stretch.

From what i know, to actually be able to save the state of a game to a hard-drive like with emulators, you'd need to save the state from the entire machine, which might be part of the reason why we haven't seen it implemented yet.
The solution presented uses up RAM space, and it works because games aren't really using the maximum RAM required.
I suppose a PC with 32GB RAM running even the most resource-demanding games could do this without much issue.

All in all, my interest in this is more of an academic nature. As i said in the OP, i have no intentions of using it.
In fact, I still can't see any appeal in playing three games at once while switching between them. At most if i'm doing something like making a project in some game like Garry's mod or minecraft or a game engine, and them switching to an actual game to think/let off steam.

 

[kraspkibble]

i'm gonna try it later.

It's not really quick resume if it does not free up the RAM

not really a problem though. PC has more RAM than consoles. i could keep a few games stored in RAM no problem. i have 32GB. windows uses 5/6GB of that. most i've seen a game use is 13GB. of course not every game uses that much so i could easily store 2-5 games assuming they use 5-12GB.

there are of course people with 64-128GB RAM in their PC so even better for them. also PC has fast SSD too which could help even if they are primarily kept in RAM. it's just a different architecture so works a bit differently. once directstorage comes along things will only get better.

 

[acm2000]

this is not the same as quick resume, the games are still stored in ram and wont persist after rebooting, so kinda pointless.

would be cool if MS added proper quick resume to game bar tho although im not sure PC drm's would agree.

 

[kuncol02]

MS should build the feature into the Xbox Game Bar more comprehensively. Considering Xbox OS is literally Windows 10, it should not be a big stretch.

Games on XBox are running in virtual machine. Only way to do that on PC would be to do same. Now there are no rules how games actually run on PC. If you want you can for example split them into multiple processes. Windows don't have enough information to for example know what processes it would need to suspend and save onto disc.

 

[Jagz]

Unencrypted savegames and cheat engine are more usefull than Quick resume

Agreed. CheatEngine is so essential, especially as you get older / have a family, etc, and don't have time to grind in single player games, like getting souls in Demon's Souls or grinding for exp in JRPGs, etc.

 

[IntentionalPun]

That... is not quick resume lol

 

[Guilty_AI]

this is not the same as quick resume, the games are still stored in ram and wont persist after rebooting, so kinda pointless.

That... is not quick resume lol

Its still pretty close and it could have its fair share of uses for some people, so its worth pointing it out.
Of course it needs further testing to see how far we can push it (like leaving 3 games suspended while the PC is on sleep mode for a week or so)

 

[MomoVideo]

this is not the same as quick resume, the games are still stored in ram and wont persist after rebooting, so kinda pointless.

would be cool if MS added proper quick resume to game bar tho although im not sure PC drm's would agree.

You can put your PC to sleep instead on shutting it down.

 

[acm2000]

You can put your PC to sleep instead on shutting it down.

cause sleep mode is super reliable and bug free, and without being able to suspend and clear from memory its also very pointless as is.

 

[nkarafo]

I don't know why this mode is so hyped. Just quicksave your game and quit. I mean, i could understand this mode being useful if a game has very long initial loading times. But these consoles also supposedly have smaller loading times as well, making this even less useful IMO.

The only instance i can see this being useful is when you want to pause in the middle of a boss fight in Dark Souls.