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What is the game-mode good for?

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o0Julia0o
Posts: 17
Joined: November 25th, 2019, 12:35 pm

What is the game-mode good for?

Post by o0Julia0o »

hi, what is the game-mode good for? Does rainmaker slow down games, if i don´t acitivate it?
Last edited by o0Julia0o on November 25th, 2019, 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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balala
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Re: What is the game-mode good for?

Post by balala »

o0Julia0o wrote: November 25th, 2019, 2:08 pm hi, what is the game-mode good for?
https://forum.rainmeter.net/viewtopic.php?f=129&t=33882#p167511
o0Julia0o wrote: November 25th, 2019, 2:08 pm Does rainmaker slow down games, if i don´t acitivate it?
Theoretically not, but depends on how many skins do you have loaded and how complex those skins are. You might notice some problems if you are using too many skins and are running some full screen games in same time.
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jsmorley
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Re: What is the game-mode good for?

Post by jsmorley »

The correct technical answer is "certainly". Anything else that your computer is doing while you are playing a game must have some impact on the performance of that game. Nothing is free...

However, it's not that stark or simple. The amount of impact any application has on the performance of other things in the system depends on several factors:

1) How powerful is your computer? How fast is the CPU, how fast is the GPU, how much and how fast is the physical RAM memory of the computer?
2) How many Rainmeter skins are you running, and probably as if not more important, what kinds of things are these skins doing? A skin that in and of itself uses a lot of CPU or GPU or both will have a much greater overall impact than a skin that doesn't.

My experience with Rainmeter and the way I use it, and the kind of games I play, is that I have no real need for Game mode. Rainmeter really never uses more than 0.2% of my CPU, and maybe 1.1% of my GPU. I simply can't tell any difference with it or without it running when I'm playing Fallout 4, or Red Dead Redemption 2, or Fortnite, or The Outer Worlds.

Having said that, if I was playing some competitive online game, like Call of Duty Modern Warfare or something where very minor differences in performance can make the difference between victory or defeat, I'd probably want to maximize what resources are available for the game. The difference between being pooned by some camper and putting one in his coconut can be measured in milliseconds...

So the long and the short of it is that your mileage will vary. The best thing to do is to try playing your game with and without your normal Rainmeter skins running. If you can see a difference, then Game mode might be a good idea. If not, which in my view is more likely, then you probably don't need to use it.

I will end this by saying that any "audio visualizer" skin WILL have an relatively large impact on your system. I would certainly not have one of those running while you are trying to tease out the last bit of FPS in your game.
o0Julia0o
Posts: 17
Joined: November 25th, 2019, 12:35 pm

Re: What is the game-mode good for?

Post by o0Julia0o »

Thx! Yeah o.k., i think not only FPS, but the Frame-Times will be have impact on gaming, too. Wouldn´t it be an idea do do some options to the gaming-mode?

Start gaming-Mode automatically if:
-a full-Screen-Window is open
-or any other window like the explorer is open
-or manually edited exe-files are running - like Steam.exe or Call Of Duty.exe
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jsmorley
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Re: What is the game-mode good for?

Post by jsmorley »

o0Julia0o wrote: November 25th, 2019, 5:44 pm Thx! Yeah o.k., i think not only FPS, but the Frame-Times will be have impact on gaming, too. Wouldn´t it be an idea do do some options to the gaming-mode?

Start gaming-Mode automatically if:
-a full-Screen-Window is open
-or any other window like the explorer is open
-or manually edited exe-files are running - like Steam.exe or Call Of Duty.exe
No, this is not something we want to decide for you, we are not in a position to evaluate your hardware or system load. It's up to you to decide if you want / need Game mode or not, and turn it on and off yourself.

To be clear, because this has come up before, we are NOT going to automate Game mode in any way, and we are NOT going to allow skin "authors" to force a user's Rainmeter into Game mode via any kind of bang or command. A human being must turn it on and off with the Rainmeter tray icon. Period.
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theimmersion
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Joined: November 27th, 2016, 1:51 pm

Re: What is the game-mode good for?

Post by theimmersion »

IN REGARDS TO
o0Julia0o wrote: November 25th, 2019, 5:44 pm Thx! Yeah o.k., i think not only FPS, but the Frame-Times will be have impact on gaming, too. Wouldn´t it be an idea do do some options to the gaming-mode?

Start gaming-Mode automatically if:
-a full-Screen-Window is open
-or any other window like the explorer is open
-or manually edited exe-files are running - like Steam.exe or Call Of Duty.exe
AND
jsmorley wrote: November 25th, 2019, 5:46 pm To be clear, because this has come up before, we are NOT going to automate Game mode in any way, and we are NOT going to allow skin "authors" to force a user's Rainmeter into Game mode via any kind of bang or command. A human being must turn it on and off with the Rainmeter tray icon. Period.
If i may share my view on this.

I know it's the "easy way out" to just include a manual button. Not saying it was easy or is easy to program that, you know what i mean, but i do think it would be nice if rainmeter supported some kind of a feature where it would 'freeze' itself when there's a fullscreen application running in foreground.

To give an example i frequently use, wallpaper engine. It's rather resource hungry (duh) but it freezes itself if it detects a fullscreen window. The only issue i have with it is that there's no feature like 'exclude window' list which i've been begging wallpaper engine to add because it stops if you use a rainmeter skin that covers the whole screen. I know, edgecase but hear me out. :???:
Using a screen size overlay blur skin as background when accessing settings menu skin for a suite, wallpaper engine detects the skin (or rather rainmeter) as full screen and pauses itself. The trick i've been using as workaround is to use exactly 1 pixel height less then the screen. This is hardly noticeable and is not considered a fullscreen by wallpaper engine anymore and so it works perfectly.
I even included it as a variable in the settings making it a feature. :lol:
E.g.
[Variables]
DisableWallpaperEnginePause=1

[SomeSkins]
Y=(#SCREENAREAHEIGHT# - #DisableWallpaperEnginePause#)

Now to be fair, i also see a lot of problems with that. Wallpaper Engine has it much easier as it's an application that is essentially the bottom most window at any time so it's fairly easy to just freeze the whole thing if there is any fullscreen window. The issue with rainmeter is that it has skins that can be "Always On Top" which complicates things a lot. So rather then just code in some freeze state for rainmeter (game mode), it would require rainmeter team to code it in such a way that the skins are frozen instead. Any skin that is in foreground. Also multi-monitor etc. I see it can get pretty convoluted.

There is one problem i see with game mode. Multi-monitor. My PC is just strong enough to maybe not need game mode.
Also, keep in mind people, you can optimize skins yourselves! Layout is your friend. You can create a lightweight button skin to load up different layouts (what i use instead of game mode) due to multi-monitor skins. 8-)
I just press a button on my mode selector (been using it for years that way :sly: ) where i remove any and all eye candy skins when i game but have some other essentials i like to keep on my screen or at least on one of my screens, like Discord, email skins etc. and generally a time skin. I like having a rather large time skin rather then sniper it in the corner, also some note skins etc, you can see where i'm going with this.
So, your imagination is your limit more then anything else in this regard. (whispers 'main, work, game layouts'). :p

BTW, i'm not on a God mode machine i9 RTX 32+ECC where i can boast or safely say you would almost never need 'game mode' (even for twitch-shooters mind you), however i do know how it is to have a very decent PC and a very very crappy PC. I am on a i5 @3.7 9600K, 8gigs with RX580 8GB atm for reference and it has a lot of performance headroom. However i was til recently and still have my old 2 core @2.3 celeron and 4 gigs and RX580 8GB (i know, dat spare graphics card yo :rofl: gotta get me some nvidia MX gpu or somethin' to balance it out) and even then i almost never needed game mode -- again, using layers effectively and also optimizing any skins as needed and knowledge/time permitted. Of course on a 2 core machine with modern games rainmeters load is 3-9% on average peaking to 30% vs 0.2% CPU load on my new machine peaking 3-4%, but only peaking like that while interacting with skins more actively which you don't do while you play (duh). But i've been using rainmeter since forever and worse case scenario, i needed to invoke my "clean" layer which has no skins loaded rather then close it or whatever when i was out of frustration of not having anything to play, trying to play a game like Fallout 4 on such a machine, ready to sacrifice a bit of my sanity to play it at sub 25fps. Then and there i'd probably use game mode where even 3-4% cpu off-load counts but again, that is also a rather edgecase scenario and should not be rainmeter team's responsibility to account for that in any much meaningful matter so i guess.. :confused:

...all in all, i guess game mode is nice to have? :confused:
Sorry for wall of text. :Whistle
Love ya! :great:
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Yamajac
Posts: 134
Joined: June 30th, 2014, 8:44 am

Re: What is the game-mode good for?

Post by Yamajac »

Yea, my suites never take up more than about 1-2% of my cpu at most at idle, and I try my best to keep it to under 0.5% when possible. I use a custom layout switcher so game mode seems kinda useless to me.

But most people don't really do that and they just load up visualizers and cpu intensive processes and don't know about layouts, or how to utilize more complicated layout switcher skins. And the game mode helps them keep CPU usage to a minimum when they're gaming.


It WOULD be nice to have a hotkey that you could set in the rainmeter manage window, or be able to set it to automatically do it when you enter a fullscreen application or the like but I think that even in it's current state it's good enough to be of use to some people. Not like it's intrusive to the people who don't want to use it either.
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