Windows 10 Game Mode Disappoints, Favors Window Store Games

Software giant Microsoft has been teasing PC gamers of a feature in the recently-released Windows 10 Creators Update that will boost the performance of their gaming experience. Called Game Mode, it was supposed to increase frame rates during gaming sessions. When it was put to the test, however, the feature offered only minimal improvements.

In a recent test run by PC World, there was a discernable improvement in the frame rates, but nowhere near what some gamers might be expecting. This is to be expected, of course, since the system is only meant to allocate more resources into the game when playing. It wasn’t meant to boost the PC’s performance in ways that it wasn’t capable of.

On the other hand, by boosting both the CPU and the GPU muscle that gamers can dedicate to the titles they are having frame rate troubles with, the offer does provide improvements in consistency. This is basically where games can often drop in frame rates in certain segments of the game, which can be quite disconcerting and would take gamers out of the immersion.

An improvement of 2 to 5 percent is about what players can generally expect, though, it would largely depend on the system they are running and what applications are running in the background, to begin with. In a recent interview, Microsoft programmer Kevin Gammill also argues that frame rate improvements of up to 10 percent are actually quite good.

Gammill also made comments about how video games bought from the Windows Store would get better performance with Game Mode than titles bought from other sources. This is because games that originate from third-party retailers often come with their own applications and software that run in the background alongside the game itself. These apps would then compete with the game for processing power.