Further details about Windows 10 Game Mode emerge

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Originally Posted by CAPTAIN_ALLCAPS

Additionally (as I have said before) there should be an option along the lines of "disable SMT for this program" since plenty of software is negatively affected by SMT.

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Alternatively, if we leave such an option out of the management then there's greater onus on getting SMT fixed across the board. Which seems like a better option, to me. If SMT really affects so many critical programs then it can just be turned off system-wide, anyway.

In the long run, if issues with SMT and HT end up being somewhat consistently present, a utility like this might end up being useful though.

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Originally Posted by globalwarning

I would hope they'd be working with CPU and GPU manufacturers, are well as game makers, to find ways to optimize games.

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Right, but what does that mean on the Windows software side (where Game Mode comes from)?

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Originally Posted by Ozaron

Alternatively, if we leave such an option out of the management then there's greater onus on getting SMT fixed across the board. Which seems like a better option, to me. If SMT really affects so many critical programs then it can just be turned off system-wide, anyway.

In the long run, if issues with SMT and HT end up being somewhat consistently present, a utility like this might end up being useful though.

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I know that in some cases (e.g. most of the mathematical models used in HPC) performance degradation when trying to hyperthread the application is inherent to the model's properties. Nevertheless, it would be handy to use the second logical core for background tasks rather than disabling hyperthreading globally - which is what usually happens in HPC. I am sure there are other scenarios too - after all, power users are likely to know more about the demands of the software they are running than the task scheduler does (which as far as I know largely organises threads on a moment-to-moment basis since it cannot know if a thread is permanently demanding or latency sensitive, or simply has the odd spurt of activity like most threads do).

I guess one alternative could be having developers writing software profiles to inform a task scheduler of things like what threads a program likes to run, which of the threads to prioritise if any, and whether they benefit from SMT.