The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update Feature Focus

Gaming Updates

Microsoft knows that gaming is still a big part of the PC experience, and also that gaming is one of the strongest markets for the PC, so they always dedicate some effort to improving gaming on the PC with each update.

Game Mode

Game Mode was added a while back, which grants exclusive, or priority access, to hardware resources for games that have it enabled. The idea is to provide a more consistent experience for the user, without any work required. Game Mode can now be toggled easily for each game right in the Game Bar interface.

GPU Monitor

For those that love more information, you can now monitor the GPU usage right in task manager, and it provides a surprising amount of detail including video decode, encode, and memory usage. It’s a feature that, when you think about it, is long overdue.

Mixer Updates

For those that want to perform game streaming, Microsoft’s Mixer service has been updated to provide better load times, and when broadcasting, you can now see audio stream sources.

TruePlay Anti-Cheating

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update also comes with a new anit-cheating API built right into Windows, called TruePlay. Cheating in online games can be a big problem, and often require the developer to put invasive code on the machine, which has its own host of security and privacy concerns. TruePlay is an API available for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) games which allow limited interaction between games and the game monitoring system.

This is likely going to be controversial, but TruePlay is an opt-in system for the end user, and TruePlay is not a “block on launch” experience, which means it’s not an all or nothing. You can opt out of TruePlay, and the game can still function, if the developer allows it.

A game with TruePlay runs in a protected process, which inhibits many common cheating attacks. In addition, Windows will monitor the gaming process for behaviours and manipulations that indicate cheating, and alerts will be generated for the game to notify it of this. Privacy is going to be a big concern here, and data is only shared with developers of the game after “processing has deteremined cheating is likely to have occurred” to quote MSDN.

Being opt-in by the user is the right play here, since this can be invasive, but for UWP games it should be a better situation than the developer writing their own anti-cheating code, which could easily have far more privacy and security concerns than a system built into Windows.