In prep for the upcoming revision of the Win10 Tweak Guide I have some thoughts about Game Mode and the Ultimate Performance Power Plan.
Lemme give you my conclusion right out of the box. IMHO, for performance Game Mode and the Ultimate Performance Power Plan are pure snake oil.
Game Mode was sold as a way to get, “better game quality and performance“.
Here are my benchmarks:
The result? No change.
Win10’s Ultimate Performance Power Plan is, well…
Microsoft when Win10 was released: “There is a High Performance power plan”
Microsoft when April Update was released: “We have an “Ultimate Performance power plan”
Us: Well, “high” was the highest setting before so wasn’t it already “ultimate”? Were you lying? Mistaken? Misleading? Exactly what does this power plan do?
Microsoft: “it goes a step further to eliminate micro-latencies associated with fine grained power management techniques”
Us: *Pauses, rereading that statement…*
Us: *Pauses, reading that statement for the third time…*
Us: WTF does that mean? We already set our machines to stop turning stuff off. What does this do? Please explain.
Microsoft: *silence*
When the Ultimate Performance Power Plan was announced I used JV16 Power Tools to monitor the registry. No changes made (like different from other power plan options). As far as I can tell it just stops shutting a few more things off than the High Performance power plan. You know, just like you’ve already been doing.
I could be wrong but since Microsoft hasn’t explained what this does we don’t know. There certainly isn’t any change in my benchmarks:
Conclusion
Like I said, snake oil. I don’t see Game Mode and the Ultimate Performance Power Plan hurting things but they don’t seem to help either.
Surprise, surprise… 🙂 When I benchmarked W7 vs W8.1 vs W10, it was usually W7 that came on top – so I would not expect any hidden performance that is still possible to squeeze out of current hardware. Windows is already optimised enough. What we can possibly see is only a decrease that could come with all the “features” that are inroducted to the OS.
No argument here.
Yup, All Ultimate power plan does over HP is keep HD at full speed, no sleep timer values.
You can easy check reg keys here(all though you will have to look up what the key does in power setting section).
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\User\PowerSchemes\e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
AFAIK e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61 is the value thats copied, not the key that is used. Article will follow.
Yes, it gets copied but if you look at keys under that key, there not doing anything “new” you could do that with any of power plans.
Now maybe its not finished yet.
I am real surprised as at least with Skylark they did bring new power plan to support new HW, for Speed-Step, but maybe Intel did all the work 🙂
To think that some people bought Windows 10 Pro for the Ultimate Performance power plan.