When playing games on your Windows PC, you should turn off certain features so that more of the system resources are available for the games. Furthermore, by turning off these features, you ensure that Windows won’t display notifications when you are in the middle of playing games. While Windows 10 does come with a game mode of its own, you can use the open-source tool GameMode for Windows 10 (also called GameMode X) for claiming some of the extra resources for your games.
The small GameMode X tool makes some changes to the system in order to disable some of the most active and resources hungry apps and services such as Windows Defender, Microsoft Cortana, Superfetch or Automatic Updates. Using GameMode X, you can easily write these changes to the system to free up resources and improve the performance of your PC while playing our favorite games.
The user interface of GameMode X has three buttons and two lists. From the blue list, you choose the services and other features in Windows 10 that you want to turn off before playing games. The green list is for re-enabling these services when you are done playing games and want to return Windows 10 back to normal mode.
Before playing games, you have to launch GameMode X and click on the blue ON button followed by the red Reboot button. After reboot, more system resources will be free for your games. After you have finished playing games and want to return back to the normal mode, you can launch GameMode X once again, click on the green OFF button followed by the red Reboot button.
There is no explanation or help available about how to use this program, but fortunately the developer has released the C# source code of the application and we were able to figure out how to use this program. From the source code, it appears that this tool makes changes in the registry to disable services or other features and then those services do not start at the next boot. Similarly, you can enable these services and features again when you want to use the PC for regular use.
GameMode X gives you an easy way to apply tweaks and stop services to make your Windows PC ready for playing games. This is especially useful when playing online games as it ensures that all of the internet bandwidth is available for your games.
You can download GameMode X (GameMode for Windows 10) from https://github.com/SyMbiANtS/GameModeWin/releases.