Microsoft introduced a ‘Game Mode’ feature in Windows 10 to help users boost their game’s performance. If enabled, your system will prioritize CPU and GPU resources towards the game you are playing. However, a slew of recent online reports suggest that the Game Mode feature is causing performance issues.
Game Mode is said to be negatively impacting the gameplay on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, so the issue doesn’t seem to be limited to a subset of gamers. A user of Reddit was one of the first to report the issue earlier this week. The post has since garnered a ton of support and other gamers have chimed in about facing similar issues.
This alleged bug is affecting gameplay for titles, including Call of Duty: Warzone and LOL (League of Legends). A few graphics cards, which seem to bear the brunt of the problem, have also been named online. These include the Radeon RX 5700 XT, RX 570, RX 480, and R9 290 from AMD and Geforce GTX 980, Geforce GTX 1080 Ti from Nvidia. AMD is already investigating the issue but it can also have to do with a recent Windows 10 update.
I too have experienced the same issues over the past week while playing Apex Legends on my Windows 10 laptop. I saw the FPS and graphics quality drop considerably from time to time, disrupting the gameplay. After reading these reports, I tried switching off Game Mode and well, it does work. The gameplay was still a bit wonky but way better graphics performance than before.
So, the easiest solution to improve performance is to turn off the Game Mode feature. It only takes a couple of clicks and the difference could be night and day. Head over to the Settings app, jump into the ‘Gaming’ section, and toggle the button off under the ‘Game Mode’ option.
Let’s hope Microsoft is aware of the problem and will push an update to make gaming on Windows 10 PCs as smooth as always. Until then, we will have to live with this easy workaround.
