How to Enable or Disable Windows 10 Game Mode Feature

Windows Game Mode priorities gaming and improves its performance. Here’re the steps to disable or enable Game Mode in Windows 10.

To improve gaming performance, Microsoft introduced a new feature called Game Mode back in the Creators Update (v1703). Regardless of your computer’s hardware and its age, when turned on, game mode potentially optimizes the system resources and increases the overall gaming performance. Now, the increase in gaming performance won’t be that dramatic. However, squeezing a bit more juice out of your hardware to increase the FPS (frames per second) and decrease frame drops is never a bad thing.

Simply put, the Game Mode feature gives you potentially better FPS (Frames per Second) and decrease frame drops. So, without further ado, here’s how you can enable or disable Windows 10 Game Mode.

Steps to Enable Windows 10 Game Mode

The above steps will turn on the Game Mode. From this point forward, whenever you launch a game, Windows will automatically detect the game and makes the necessary Game Mode configuration changes to improve the game performance.

Note: By default, the Game Mode feature is enabled on all Windows 10 machines. However, some applications or you yourself disabled the feature, you can follow the above steps to enable it via the Windows 10 Settings app.

Disable Game Mode

If the Game Mode feature is not working as intended or causing unnecessary problems, you can disable it. To disable the game mode, open the Settings app, go to “Gaming → Game Mode” and turn OFF the switch under the Game Mode option.

Once you turn off Game Mode, Windows will not make any changes to the system while you are playing.

What’s Does Game Mode Do in Windows 10?

Out of the box, Windows 10 runs in what’s called a Standard mode profile. As the name suggests, it is the default mode. In this mode, Windows tries to balance both performance and power consumption by limiting certain applications, applications behavior, and Windows behavior. In the day to day computer usage, the Standart mode is pretty helpful for the vast majority of users.

However, if you are a gamer you might want the game to run at its full potential and not be limited in terms of performance due to power consumption limitations. This is especially true for desktop gamers. That’s where the Game Mode feature comes into play.

When the Game Mode is enabled, it will automatically detect when you are playing a game and removes the regular standard restrictions. Game Mode also limits the number of background processes and the system resources they can use for background activities like scanning, updating, indexing, etc. Moreover, Windows also configures some settings to prioritize gaming processes and tasks both in CPU and GPU. This potentially increases the available system resources for the running game which in turn gives you better overall performance with increased FPS.

Now, for those of you wondering, Windows already has a high-performance mode which can be enabled in the Control Panel’s Power Options. The high-performance setting removes the power consumption limits. However, it doesn’t optimize the system for gaming. That’s the reason why Microsoft introduced the Game Mode feature.

That is all. It is that simple to enable or disable the Game Mode feature in Windows 10. If you are stuck or need some help, comment below and I will try to help as much as possible. If you like this article, do check out how to enable ultimate performance mode Windows 10.