Tuesday, September 12th 2017
Microsoft Acknowledges Gaming Performance Issues Under Win 10 Creators Update
Microsoft made considerable noise on their vaulted Game Mode, a Windows feature which made its appearance in their latest Creators Update version of Windows 10. Game Mode was one of the foremost features in the latest Windows update, which was supposed to deliver improved performance in gaming or other full-screen 3D applications, by enabling more of the available CPU and GPU resources to be tapped into by specific applications. Specific CPU (through winding down of non-crucial processes) and GPU (through prioritization of game-related graphics memory allocation) improvements were baked into this latest version; supposedly, only performance improvements should result from this effort on Microsoft's part.
However, things are not as rosy as they should be, and users soon started reporting performance issues with stuttering and lower than expected frame-rates under the latest version of Windows - which didn't occur prior to the Creators Update. Microsoft has been mum on the issue; until now. The company has now officially acknowledged that there are indeed situations where gamers could experience frame-rate and stuttering issues, and has even issued a fix for one such situation with the latest, fast-ring build 16273 and above versions of Windows. However, this has fixed only one of multiple origin points for the reported issues.
Some users are reporting that disabling the Xbox Game DVR feature eliminates the issues, but this isn't working for every user that remains affected. Likely, the issue lies with Microsoft's Game Mode interface and Xbox interface additions to Windows 10 with the Creators Update. It's somewhat of a paradox: at the same time that Microsoft introduces specific CPU and GPU workload optimizations for full-screen applications, they introduce an additional interface layer on top of your 3D application, enabling additional Xbox-based functionality (such as the aforementioned DVR capability). Likely, that's the culprit of the whole performance issues; it remains to be seen whether all sources of the performance issues will be fixed through windows updates, or if users will have to wait until the Fall Creators Update for a fully resolved scenario.
Sources:
MS PowerUser, Windows Feedback Hub, via Neowin
Some users are reporting that disabling the Xbox Game DVR feature eliminates the issues, but this isn't working for every user that remains affected. Likely, the issue lies with Microsoft's Game Mode interface and Xbox interface additions to Windows 10 with the Creators Update. It's somewhat of a paradox: at the same time that Microsoft introduces specific CPU and GPU workload optimizations for full-screen applications, they introduce an additional interface layer on top of your 3D application, enabling additional Xbox-based functionality (such as the aforementioned DVR capability). Likely, that's the culprit of the whole performance issues; it remains to be seen whether all sources of the performance issues will be fixed through windows updates, or if users will have to wait until the Fall Creators Update for a fully resolved scenario.
31 Comments on Microsoft Acknowledges Gaming Performance Issues Under Win 10 Creators Update
fail Creators Update :) had to look harder just in case i misread
Have fallen back to win 7 few months ago, and no complaints. Especially when my 1080ti decided after the creators update, that it could not hold 100hz in Rocket League anymore. That game can run on a Potato......
having seen all the issues with the 'Creators' update on the BF1 forums I never had any intention of using it thankfully.
Be thankful he doesn't "go native" on you. :P
Sadly, the "tracking" thing has pretty much reached buzzword status.
I do agree with the rest of his comment though, it seems the tracking components get q&a out the wazoo, while "normal" desktop functions are left high and dry.
I mean 8/8.1 outperformed it in gaming...
But when you say you don't care about dx12, I question just how commited to gaming a person can be. You'll need it sooner or later.
I think it took the best of both 7 and 8, personally. And they'll fix this current issue soon enough.
The bulk of the Spring (and now Fall) updates are just cumulative updates like we're always used to though.
Also 8.1 doesnt "outperform" win 7 in gaming, at best it is as good. Windows 7 with windows classic theme is still the fastest on any task/benchmark.
I guess I'm happy enough to just move on to 10 to even look into it further. The only reason I needed it was Skyrim's vram/enb issues... and even that is being fixed.
I haven't really needed dx12 either tbh, but now with Forza 7, I will.
Mind you, you're not missing much. At best the difference is 5%, usually much lower.
Windows 10 Anniversary Update 1607
- SuperPi 32M: 7 minutes 03 seconds +/- 1 second
- 3Dmark Time Spy: 9900 +/- 50 points
Windows 10 Creators Update 1703
- SuperPi 32M: 7 minutes 20 seconds +/- 1 second
- 3Dmark Time Spy: 9800 +/- 50 points
3Dmark dropped only slightly, which I'm not worried about, but the single-threaded SuperPi 32M numbers dropped about 4% which got me annoyed. That's like taking 200+MHz off my CPU clocks (I run my 5960x at 4.5GHz constant). I spent a few hours checking things in the task manager but didn't see anything obvious that was chewing up performance. Did stuff like disable Cortana (which seems a lot more pervasive in the Creator's Update), manually setting core affinity for SuperPi but no help. So I rolled back to the Anniversary Update and performance is restored. I mentioned this performance hit when the windows update survey asked why I'm rolling back. I hope Microsoft figured out what is going on and fixes it.