Spent days trying to figure out why Witcher 3 was stuttering for me. Checked the entire system only to find out it was Game Mode. It's located at settings>gaming>Game Mode. Also disabled the recordings at 'Game Bar'. If you're having frame skips or similar issues at the moment then this might be it. Fucking Windows. Back to enjoying this great game

It really irritates me when systems and devices today introduce poorly documented magic modes with no real explanation what they do, why they should be needed, and why the system supposedly isn't good enough for that task without the magic mode. Generally, I would expect and desire a system to be good without such a mode, and as soon as such a thing is introduced, I grow very suspicious: what are the caveats? What are they doing wrong? Where lies the lie? What assumptions does the mode make in order to properly?

Ah the glorious (mis/mal/anti-)information age.

I had game bar disabled but game mode was on. Wonder what it does. Only game I could say had some stuttering was Control, but only in DX12 mode which seems to be a common issue. I dunno! Will be interesting to see if I notice a difference.

I think Microsoft is breaking win10 so they can fix it later.

It's very unlikely that Game Mode was causing stuttering. All Game Mode does is prioritize the game process and memory usage.

Try it again with Game Mode on and Game Bar recording off to see if it still stutters.

Scheduling is a very complex topic and it wouldn't be the first time when prioritizing a supposedly important resource hog process ends up hurting performance because there are other important tasks that eventually must run. See also priority inversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_inversion

I'm not saying this is what's happening here, but let's not dismiss the possibility. "All it does is (simple task)" can end up having large consequences :)

I'm telling you, it's a night and day difference! Fucks with the frame times for some reason. Everything is now back to normal. Silky smooth

Well I'll have to remember to try that if I have similar problems.

I've never had any issues with Game Mode, but Game bar was messing with a few games until I disabled it.

I often wonder how extensive windows software would be if you removed all the antii competition, spyware, and extortion of the third party industry elements out of it?

Personally I think a conservative figure would be that the software would be 70% smaller and 200% faster!

And just imagine all the bogus nonsense hidden under the banner of 'security' and or 'game mode'? hehehehe

Sigh. . . another software marketing OS tweak just to make it look like a new product. Wonder whether I can access Game Mode via the Control Panel. . . or is that just a Settings 'exclusive.' Just exactly how much more gooey can we make GUI? zzzzzz.

Stick with Windows 7 if you can.

Me vote yes!
That is something I really would like to see, a "official" stripped version of windows. How desperate should MS be to do such a thing?

Win 8.1 is the way to go IMHO even if that opinion is not popular, pretty much the best of both 7 and 10. Of course with Classic Shell installed,

And what about all these windows updates? They dont even give you the option not to install it.... you can install it now or you can install it on restart.... dont want to install it? Too fucking bad for you. And then sometimes taking several hours to perform the update and you cannot use your computer during that time. If you update any other software or game, how long does it take? 2 minutes at the most! Finally the windows update finishes and looks exactly the same as before. What could it possibly have been doing during those 4 hours??? I think what they are doing is inspecting all your other software and working out which software companies they can extort to remain compatible with windows in the future.

As for Windows 8, well, this is another mystery about Microsoft..... because how can you tell me that disappearing the start button is something no one at Microsoft anticipated might annoy people?????????

Don't get us all started over the follies of MS since Windows 8!!!!! It's like asking people to discuss why Star Wars has sucked since Episode 1! ;)

And this is a great video for all of us that don't love W10 (as it explains why):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjhjPJHxpqg

Try windows updates on a very low end device. Laast year I charge the tablet battery and let it drain until install is complete. Guess what, at the end of the day, after a full battery charge it was still not complete!

Win 8.1 with classic shell installed (and disabled corners) every thing is fixed, just like Win7 but with a response and smoothness not even comparable.
TBH, I almost never use the start menu anymore, right click on the start button has pretty much all the technical stuff needed, a couple desktop icons and some on the toolbar is what works for me...

Actually I find the Win10 start menu much more obnoxious than the stock 8 thingy (pretty much than any start menu)...
And who the hell thinks I do want Candy crush saga on the pc???
The funny part is, on Linux there are some desktops wich use more or less the same thing as did windows 8 (or vice versa), Ubuntu has a similar "start menu".