Windows 10 Game Mode may be a thing

Microsoft is working on the last bits of the Windows 10 Creators Update which it plans to release in March 2017 to the public.

The name of the update reveals a major focus of what is coming, and that is introducing new options to "create things" on Windows 10.

While that is the focus, it is clear that other changes will come along as well. If you are a gamer, or play games on your Windows 10 PC, then you may be interested in something called Game Mode that may be coming along with the update.

The only thing we know about Game Mode is that the latest build of Windows 10 ships with a gamemode.dll which was not there before. Please note that the dll was spotted in the leaked build Windows 10 build 14997. This build is not yet available through official channels.

Windows 10 Game Mode rumors

Many assume that Game Mode will be a special mode of operation of Windows 10 that will prioritize resources for games so that they may run at peak performance.

If you think "turbo mode" now, something that many tweak programs ship with, you may be mistaken. It would obviously be really bad if Game Mode would do nothing more than stop a couple of services and processes while games are running, as the past has shown that this won't do much in terms of performance.

Microsoft's main advantage is that it controls the operating system and may implement the new mode in a way that it pushes game performance.

The main question is how well Microsoft's game mode implementation improves performance for games running on the system.

Also, it is unclear if all games will benefit from the mode, or if it will be restricted to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) releases. The latter would be quite disappointing considering that the bulk of gaming happens outside of the Windows Store ecosystem as platforms such as Steam, Origin or uPlay are where most of the gaming happens.

Lastly, it is unclear whether Game Mode will be an automated feature that does its optimizations in the background whenever games are detected, or if users will have options to control the feature.

I cannot really see it push game performance by much, but I'll apologize openly to Microsoft should it turn out that Windows 10's Game Mode improves game performance significantly.

Now You: What is your take on Windows 10's Game Mode?