Windows 10 Getting a Game Mode That Would Improve Game Performance - Report (gamespot.com) 164
Microsoft may have plans to improve gaming experience on Windows 10. The speculation comes after long time watcher @h0x0d found a new "gamemode.dll" in the latest Windows 10 developer build, reports GameSpot. The feature appears to allow Windows 10 to adjust CPU and GPU resources when running a game to allocate more power for the game that's running instead of toward any background apps. From the article: The feature will reportedly launch as part of the Creators update and will be enabled for Windows Insider users soon. What's unclear is exactly which games this is compatible with. It's possible it could be limited to only to those downloaded from the Windows Store, or it might be much more far-reaching. We should know more once Windows Insiders testers get their hands on the feature.
This is needed (Score:1, Insightful)
Becaus Windows wants all the resources for itself.
Re:This is needed (Score:4, Funny)
And the remainder is the battleground between the antivirus and the bloatware.
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If you're running bloatware, or need on-access antivirus that would inhibit gaming performance... you're doing it wrong.
Run a nightly scan and don't open crap you shouldn't.
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So I need an I7 with 32gigs of RAM only to run the fucking OS?
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Which means the OS is a bloated piece of crap.
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Very definitely not true. I have a dual-boot laptop with Win10 (running Classic Shell) and Lubuntu. Guess which one uses more resources?
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So I need an I7 with 32gigs of RAM only to run the fucking OS?
I ran Windows Vista and Win7 on an AMD quad-core processor and 4GB RAM for nine years without problems. I'm currently running Win10 on an AMD eight-core processor and 8GB RAM without problems.
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Woooooosh!
I should have added a note that you don't necessarily need a eight-core processor for Win10. After nine years with the same configuration, I was able to double the performance for $200 with a new processor, motherboard and ram.
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An 8 core AMD CPU is about on par with a dual core Intel CPU performance-wise.
I have Windows 10 on an inexpensive Dell laptop with an Intel dual-core processor. I can easily max out both cores and wait five minutes by opening 15 tabs in Chrome. If I do that on my PC with the AMD eight-core processor, everything loads quickly.
Delay Windows Update? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Delay Windows Update? (Score:4, Informative)
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On other hand, many people might not be into that at all.
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Set your wifi/ethernet connection to metered, and you'll only be broken out of your full screen games for it to whine at you that it couldn't download updates.
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You can't set ethernet to metered.
Re:Delay Windows Update? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more annoying to me is how Microsoft blithely ignores your customized configuration and resets stuff after certain updates. Like re-enabling Cortana, and pinning Edge and the Windows Store back to your taskbar. It's a PITA to have to disable and unpin those all over again on dozens of computers after an update.
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Because you might need to pull files off from a remote location? Maybe you would like to bring up a live feed to see if anything is wrong?
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Re: Delay Windows Update? (Score:2)
Mom, someone on the Internet was mean to me!
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just shut off updates, cause we all know there's not a time you wont be playing multiplayer games :p
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No but it will spy on your gaming. You know username name, friends, playstyle, what games you play and how long you play them, how much you are spending on gaming what social media ties to your gaming. Not to forget tracking all that online chatting, every comment, every purchase, every marketing manipulation that works. It is you that is being gamed.
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You either are resetting your date, or you have never rebooted - the insider preview does have a 90 day kill switch in it. Found it after not using my laptop for 4 months and then trying to boot up.
the only way i got past the switch was by resetting my bios time and then booting. I then got my files off of it and loaded win 7 pro instead.
the ONLY reason they have that kill switch in there is because at some point it'll be a rent a os.
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the ONLY reason they have that kill switch in there is because at some point it'll be a rent a os.
Or it's because it's an insider build, a beta OS that is not meant to stick around, and by agreeing to the insider program you sign up to be testing the latest build.
The fact this widely known part of being on the insider program came as a surprise to you really just shows that you should never have been using an insider build in the first place.
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Remember when they said that the final Windows version would not have a number? It will be a forced update to Windows 10.
Beep Boop (Score:1)
Can we finally remove / disable the Game Bar? (Score:2)
Oh you can turn it off after you log into the XBox app, don't have an XBox account? Well then I guess you are creating one or hacking the registry to break it so it stops running.
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Fuck Win 10 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fuck Win 10 (Score:5, Funny)
He was lying. Win 7 doesn't collect telemetry...at least it didn't originally, maybe a Windows update put it in.
You posted as AC, but from that quote it will be easy to find who you are, simply by listing people that lived in a cave for the last year or so.
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KB971033 Windows Activation Technologies
KB3139929 Security update for Internet Explorer
KB3083710 Windows Update Client
KB3083324 Windows Update Client
KB3080149 Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
KB3080149 Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
KB3065987 Windows Update Client
KB3050267 Windows Update Client
KB3050265 Windows Update Client
KB3035583 Update installs Get Windows 10 app
KB3022345 Update for customer experience and diagnosti
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It's a trojan horse. They added the telemetry to 7/8 as a recommended update at some point. Now he wants to upsell you on Win10 offering some level of user control over the telemetry. Thing is, you don't have to download the telemetry update. I certainly didn't. And the "user control over telemetry" is percentage-based, certainly not an absolute value.
IE: Users can control 25% of the 1000 points of telemetry data MS collects about you Vs. 0% control of the 20 points of telemetry data in 7/8.
You're still get
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So which KB number is the telemetry update?
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https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/list-of-windows-7-telemetry-updates-to-avoid.379151/ [wilderssecurity.com]
GNU/Linux (Score:1, Funny)
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We have battalion, Doom, Quake II and Xlander! What more do you need?!
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And if that's not enough, there are for instance a bunch of Paradox games, should keep you busy for a while.
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Doom and quake 1/2/3 have native Linux builds, just use them and swipe the data files from the Windows version. It's not rocket science. I was playing native Doom on Linux back in '94.
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I'll just leave these here.
https://warthunder.com/en/news... [warthunder.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Strat
Game mode for active window. (Score:3, Insightful)
Next up someone will write a program to keep whatever the current active window is in game mode.
Because whatever the user is interacting with should pretty much always take precedence over what isn't even visible on screen.
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With the exception that far more PC games support mods.
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Priority one critical system stuff like NTFS
Priority two whatever the user wants to do.
Priority tree whatever else needs to be done indexing can go fk itself if a user is active.
These are priorities stuff still runs just a bit slower than it normally does IIRC windows already does this to a point.
*checks*
Yeah it's done this since at least as far back as windows XP
https://www.microsoft.com/reso... [microsoft.com]
Although It's only a slight priority difference so it's not usually noticeable.
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Don't forget priority 4: security. lol.
Re:Game mode for active window. (Score:4, Insightful)
Next up someone will write a program to keep whatever the current active window is in game mode.
Because whatever the user is interacting with should pretty much always take precedence over what isn't even visible on screen.
Except when you're doing a processing-heavy task that does not require your interaction and you're just playing around on something else on the computer to waste time while that job is completing.
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So what your saying is... (Score:3, Interesting)
...you found a .dll. And you HOPE this is what its for? Ok, cool story bro. ALIENS!!!!
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Hahaha what's next are they going to claim the windows NT _NSAKEY is for use by the nsa?
Game Mode On! (Score:1)
Can we get an option where Game Mode is always on? The user experience should be greatly improved without even running any games.
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I hope this will only concern games from the store (Score:2)
Right now, I can play my games, while recording the whole audio/video output, AND record a secondary audio through a third program. All of this without performance issue. I'm fairly certain if MS implement any sort of "better" scheduling for gaming this will not work as well anymore.
Call me a pessimist if you want, but at this point it's more akin to experience.
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APK, serious question: most software I write does work on background threads and the interface thread just waits for updates. Your code seems to put just the GUI thread into "real time mode" which will not help the actual task running on the background threads. Any comments on this?
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Hi APK, see my other post. I think we're in agreement, which is cool. Have a happy new year mate, all the best,
NotAPK
Reduced Imaging? (Score:1)
So let me see if I understand (Score:2)
Normally Windows runs in an inefficient mode where it prioritizes background tasks, the OS, and other things that are not in the immediate interest of the user, but if a game is running it can now optionally decide to play nice and prioritize the user's chosen activity?
Gee, that's nice. Maybe a little late - I mean, I sort of expected my personal computer to prioritize the f'ing work I'm actually trying to do _at all times_, and I've pretty much done that since I first encountered multitasking back in 1985,
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Disk io has had priority, such that in NT 4 and above, you can watch controls get painted line by line, if io is happening. Even if no swapping is taking place.
This was discounted in NT 4 as underpowered servers, in W2K as cheap memory or HDD, and in Vista as shitty coding. But the problem remains in 7 at least.
Heavy io with minimal CPU means nearly zero CPU to spend at all. Even if io is only intermittently heavy.
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It's also almost impossible to monitor IO on Windows with the standard tools.
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Thanks APK, you made me chuckle this morning.
Happy New Year!
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APK, my friend, the whole point is you can't. The non-deterministic nature of multi-threaded tasks makes any sort of general optimization impossible. I think you know this, since you somewhat allude to it in your post. Any given parallel task can only be made more efficient in parallel through domain specific optimizations. This is why we don't have a magic "parallel" tick box in the compiler options. For anyone else who's reading, and is interested in these kinds of things, it all comes down to how you can
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It sounds good, but you run the risk of over-optimization, which means your code runs fast on your system, but there is no guarantee that it will do so on any general system. In other words: your users may be seeing worse performance than you are.
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"Multithreading you suggest (that I do albeit only on things benefitting concurrent ops) can backfire - how?"
Any one process is not universally aware of the load from other processes on the system. By over-optimizing you have tweaked your code execution to be as fast as possible under the exact same conditions at the time of optimization: this relates to CPU workload, memory bandwidth, memory fragmentation, slower IO to storage, and even bus communications such as streaming 10Gbit/s LAN packets through to m
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"they don't impress me @ all - they're just men too man"
Agree 100%!!!
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I've complained for 15 years that Microsoft doesn't understand these two concepts:
1. Locking out the TERMINAL (i.e., network address) instead of the USER ACCOUNT in an attempted breach so people can't DOS all your users or continue an attack by simply trying different usernames.
2. Prioritizing I/O
Shut down all background processes (Score:2)
Does it provide a "pure" environment for just the game? That would be something.
Ah! Taking Us Back To The Good Old Days (Score:2)
Windows 10 Game Mode, code name "Windows 7"... (Score:2)
background apps? (Score:2)
What background apps? do they mean keylogging spyware^^^Customer Experience Improvement Program? ETL tracing running 24/7 and writing ~1GB to disk per day? Cortana calling home once per hour no matter what? Metro garbage?
all uninstalled/blocked/deleted
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Deb... [github.com]
http://win10epicfail.proboards... [proboards.com]
https://www.hwinfo.com/misc/Re... [hwinfo.com]
Linux has had this feature for ages .. (Score:2)
Sadly... (Score:1)
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