Well, who’d have thought it would come to this! Back in 2017, Microsoft introduced a Game Mode with the Windows 10 Creators Update, promising performance boosting improvements.
You know, when playing video games.
Or even doing certain computing intensive tasks.
Fast forward three years, and a growing number of users are experiencing performance issues, not boosts, when they have the Game Mode enabled on their PCs. Meaning, instead of making the experience better, things are made worse when this setting is toggled on.
The idea behind this feature is to prioritize games while minimizing background tasks. However, as things stand, many games suffer from poorer frame rates, stutters and freezes.
This phenomenon is affecting several games, including popular online titles like Call of Duty: Warzone and League of Legends.
What’s worse is that some of these issues were previously attributed to GPU drivers for the AMD Radeon RX 5000 series. Luckily, AMD engineers have already confirmed that they are on the issue, though nothing from Microsoft as of yet.
As for the problem itself, complaints are not just limited to the new AMD hardware — older Radeon cards and some NVIDIA GPUs are affected as well.
That said, it’s not exactly clear whether this has got something to do with the Game Mode feature itself, or if a recent Windows update did something to intensify the trouble. It could very well be a combination of things, as it so often is.
The solution, meanwhile, is to simply disable Game Mode by going to Settings > Gaming.
If you are trying to figure out why your games are stuttering, freezing, or even crashing, then this is the first thing you should be doing.
