A little note about gaming on Windows 10

I upgraded to Windows 10 as soon as I could, only to find that my system performance dropped dramatically after I did so, especially when I was gaming on my primary monitor and watching Netflix or a movie or something on my secondary. Well, maybe not "dramatically," but enough to be noticeable: WoW on one screen and Netflix on another never stressed even my seven-year-old processor under Win7, so even a bit of choppiness was a little weird. I figured my system was just getting old at first, before I found the culprit.

Windows 10 has some neat built-in XBOX stuff that acts kind of like the Steam overlay does, letting you stream and take screenshots/record video even when the game doesn't support it natively. I fooled around with the settings a bit when I first upgraded but didn't really pay them too much attention. As it turns out, either I had enabled the Background Recording feature or the XBOX app has it enabled by default, which was constantly writing video to my drive. Despite my game and boot drive both being SSDs, it was enough to degrade performance noticeably when I was doing anything video-related on my second monitor.

The more you know! Background recording's a super neat feature and I'll probably enable it when I build my Skylake box, but disabling it has returned everything to normal. If you're running into any stuttering after upgrading to 10, might want to check the XBOX app and make sure it's turned off.

Hmm, this makes me wonder if this is the culprit of the weird stuttering I've been noticing recently. I'll have to give this a shot. For the most part I've not noticed performance problems with Windows 10 though. If anything my performance has been better in most areas.

If this gets rid of my video stutter I will praise you forever.

Interesting. Everything I can find indicates that the DVR functionality has to be enabled manually. For what it's worth I've seen smoother performance with my games but I've also not played very many and most of them are older. Quick question though are you using DSR? Most of the performance issues I've run into with 10 comes from combining DSR and other AA methods.

Heyyy, reporting back. So I didn't have the automatic recording enabled but the option to record clips was still on (the very first option) so I turned that off. I just disabled all of it. I think it's too early to be completely sure that the two are related but the stuttering I was having is gone now, so thanks for that (potentially).

Haven't you noticed frame drops on Windows 10 in comparison to Windows 7?

I didn't upgrade my big rig yet as i fear that i might suffer a performance hit since my graphics card is old and struggling to run new games in an acceptable performance.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if going with a 6-core processor over Skylake would be a better option if I wanted to do recordings and general video editing and still play games at max settings at the same time.

I've found no difference here in games and even a slight improvement in a few benchmarks but I'm not a streamer or multi-monitor user.

I use two monitors and Windows 10 is overall quicker or the same in just about everything. It's good!