“Game Mode” is back in the news again.
ARSTechnica: Windows 10 Game Mode: Free FPS boost of a few percent, with more to come
Thurrott: Windows Insiders Will Get Game Mode This Week
In the link above ARS talked with Kevin Gammill, partner group program manager for the Xbox platform. He stated that “when Game Mode is active, the operating system will tend to be biased toward allocating CPU and GPU resources to the game.”
My belief is that it will be tied to, or similar to, or involved with the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service. I’ve no proof, I haven’t seen anything, I haven’t talked to anyone. It’s just a hunch.
I’m thinking that you’ll be able to tell Win10 to use MMCSS for your game, or not.
The MMCSS settings are stored in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
This key contains a REG_DWORD value named SystemResponsiveness that determines the percentage of CPU resources that should be guaranteed to low-priority tasks. For example, if this value is 20, then 20% of CPU resources are reserved for low-priority tasks. Note that values that are not evenly divisible by 10 are rounded up to the nearest multiple of 10. A value of 0 is also treated as 10.
The key also contains a subkey named Tasks that contains the list of tasks. By default, Windows supports the following tasks:
Audio
Capture
Distribution
Games
Playback
Pro Audio
Window Manager