Por ejemplo, take this assessment from Dark Side of Gaming:
Game mode is a feature that a lot of PC gamers were looking forward to. This mode is available in the latest Windows 10 Insiders Build, however it appears that it does not offer any performance improvement at all.
Microsoft claimed that it targets to improve performance via two ways with Game Mode: a) an increase overall framerate or peaks and b) an increase in average framerates or consistency.
A number of PC users got their hands on this build and according to some early tests, Windows 10’s Game mode is a big letdown as it did not actually offer any performance improvement at all.
What follows is details of tests using actual games "in the wild," some with video evidence, showing no performance improvements at all.
A more rigorous test by Laptop showed basically the same result:
A more rigorous test by Laptop showed basically the same result:
To test Game Mode, we put the latest Insider Build on the Asus ROG Strix GL753 with a 2.8-GHz Intel Core i7-770HQ CPU, 16GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU with 4GB of VRAM, a 256GB M.2 SSD and a 1TB, 5,400-rpm hard drive. Then, we ran some of our standard benchmark tests with Game Mode enabled.
The results were mixed, at best. While all of the games we tested recognized Game Mode, we only saw one noticeable performance improvement.
The GL753 played Grand Theft Auto V (very high settings) at 31.22 frames per second, just surpassing our 30-fps threshhold to be considered playable and higher than the 28-fps it achieved without Game Mode.
But in Hitman (very high settings) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (configured for a budget setup), we didn't see any noticeable changes. Our benchmarks ran within decimal points of previous scores.This is not surprising for me; after all, I'd already predicted that Game Mode would have effectively zero impact on actual gamers' experiences.
For one thing, it really is more about UWP games than about Win32 (i.e. Steam, Origin, GoG, UPlay, etc.) executables, While Microsoft claims that Win32 games will be supported by Game Mode, they are architected differently from UWP applications (that uniformity of architecture is the entire point of UWP, after all), and may need to be grandfathered into Game Mode literally one game at a time. If that's true, then Game Mode support will be like game-specific GPU driver support: nice for games that have it, but useless for almost all other games.
For another thing, the performance enhancements are mostly supposed to come from de-prioritizing non-essential services and applications, but most PC gamers keep very few extraneous programs on while gaming, anyway, and running on at least 6 or 8 processor cores to boot, which means that prioritizing the game doesn't actually mean much, in practice. Only live-streamers have a lot of extra program load to worry about when gaming, and they've mostly invested in beastly rigs that can handle the extra load.
So... as expected, Game Mode is more of a PR stunt than an actual feature. It doesn't break anything, at least, which is more than can be said for some of Microsoft's previous efforts in this direction, but it's not game-changing in any sense at all, at least so far... and, let's face it, if it isn't offering significant performance benefits to at least the 100 or so most popular Win32 games right out of the gate, it probably won't get used later on, even if Microsoft manage to improve it. You only get one chance to make a first impression; the fact that Microsoft is willing to let Game Mode's first impression be so lacklustre says a lot about their current level of desperation.
It's like Microsoft were hoping that the promise of a performance-enhancing Game Mode will move gamers to Windows 10 before the mode even goes live, and whether or not it provides any actual enhancements to game performance. Honestly, I think they're more likely to gain new Windows 10 "converts" in the PC gaming community just from gamers buying new PCs.