Back in my day, when it was time to play a game, we had to exit Windows and boot into the game from a command prompt. There was no such thing as Alt-Tabbing\u00a0between my game and whatever else I\u2019d been doing on the computer. And there was no bulky, RAM-hogging Windows instance running underneath the game I was trying to play. While that exact scenario isn\u2019t going to be coming back anytime soon, Microsoft has confirmed that a\u00a0performance-enhancing Game Mode is coming to the operating system alongside the Creators Update scheduled to release this spring.<\/p>\n
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Evidence of the mode was first dug up last month, but now we have official word.\u00a0Details on how the mode works are light, but Xbox executive Mike Ybarra confirmed one of the big lingering questions on Twitter<\/a>, saying that the game mode will work for both Win32 and UWP games. In other words, the mode isn\u2019t just for games purchased through the Windows store.\u00a0This was my biggest fear when the feature was outed.\u00a0Microsoft has a history of making cool features and then letting them stumble and die by keeping them as Windows 10-exclusives.<\/p>\n There\u2019s no promise yet that it\u2019ll work with every game, but it sounds like it\u2019s a rather low-level feature that would do things like suspending processes that could get in the way of an ideal gaming experience. Hopefully, then, it\u2019ll be something that just works with every game and doesn\u2019t require any developer intervention.<\/p>\n The feature will roll out to Windows Insiders in the near future, and we\u2019ll see it publicly whenever the Creators Update comes to Windows 10.<\/p>\nWill this work with every game? We don\u2019t know yet.<\/h3>\n