You don't even get what I'm saying but continue to argue. PC _may be_ doing less in the background than you've reserved resources for, it's 100% up the the user. The OS itself doesn't do much in the background.
I still think you are drastically underestimating how much is going on in the background for a typical person's computer.
But when computers have 8, 12, 16 cores, reserving one for the OS is not a big deal.
"Losing" one core to gain exclusive access to the rest of them will result in better and more consistent game performance than shared access to all of them.
And you weren't forced to use it. You'd just bring up the Game Bar and click Game Mode to toggle the option.
It's completely different to PC where there is no such set of guaranteed background features and no stable spec either, and this is why a console approach will always fail on PC.
But that's exactly
why Game Mode was a good idea. Enabling it
did guarantee consistent performance.
Let me put this another way:
I do a lot on my PC. When I open a game, there may still be several other applications running in the background because I don't have the time/patience to shut down every single application and then re-open them again and set up my workspace as it was before. That wastes a lot of time. That's why virtual desktops are a thing.
- Maybe I'm taking a break from a project I'm working on and still have applications open, along with reference materials and browser windows on a separate virtual desktop.
- Maybe the PC is serving media to another device on my network, running an hourly backup script, duplicating or re-balancing data on a drive pool.
- Or maybe I just have OBS running because I'm streaming/recording the game.
Game Mode was a simple
option I could enable in a game that would de-prioritize all of that and move it off the CPU cores that the game is running on - resulting in better and more consistent performance due to a console-like utilization of the available resources.
Sure, as it was implemented it did not work well on older 4c4t CPUs, but those are not relevant in 2020, and
it was optional.
It was a great idea but a non-optimal implementation. As core counts increase, so do the advantages of such a feature - because you can adjust the split so that both the game and background applications have access to more resources without affecting the other. And if you don't like that you don't have to use it.
