

Gammill said that both types of games will see gains but that UWP games may see slightly better numbers. Game Mode will work for both traditional Win32 games and new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) games sold through the Windows Store. What will this all add up to? For games that are currently CPU- or GPU-bound, Gammill said that Microsoft was seeing framerate improvements of 2 to 5 percent. Gammill refused to be drawn into specifics, but he said that it was something along the lines of suspending or deferring unnecessary background tasks and using process priorities and processor affinity to limit any performance impact of multitasking.

What that first iteration actually does is still something of a mystery. This is a long-term goal the Creators Update will contain the first iteration of Game Mode, but it shouldn't be the last. Game Mode won't be turning the PC into a console any time soon, but it could start to provide a little more predictability. Console hardware is much more predictable than PC hardware, with developers knowing exactly how many processor cores and GPU shaders, and how much system memory, they'll have access to at any moment. Gammill didn't say this (and probably for good reason there are segments of the PC gaming community that would regard the following as dirty words), but it sounds to us like the aim is to make PC gaming a little more, well, console-like. Gamill said that when Game Mode is active, the operating system will tend to be biased toward allocating CPU and GPU resources to the game. The overarching goal is to make Windows 10 "the best operating system for games"-and critically, to make it more consistent, so that frame rates and performance are more predictable and uniform. We spoke to Kevin Gammill, partner group program manager for the Xbox platform, about what Game Mode was for and what to expect. Redmond is still being a bit coy about precisely what Game Mode will and won't do, but the picture has become a little clearer. Earlier this month, Microsoft confirmed that the Windows 10 Creators Update coming later this year would include a new feature called "Game Mode."
