The Redmond-based company is testing a new mode that will optimize GPU consumption and thus allow you to save battery
In the future, Windows 10 could consume less battery power on your laptop. In the build 19564 of the operating system (an update under development, currently being tested in Microsoft’s “fast ring”) a new option has appeared that could make the computer’s GPU consume less power.
Also other settings have been added to the PCs’ graphics management in this build, but the one on GPU management seems the most interesting because it follows what most hardware manufacturers have already been doing, for quite some time to tell the truth, in their graphics card drivers. Only it does it at the operating system level and that, hopefully, should increase the effectiveness and stability of this new feature. As always, when it comes to development builds and not official updates, there’s no guarantee that a novelty will actually become a feature.
Windows 10 and GPU management: what changes
In practice, the novelty consists in the possibility, at the operating system level, to set the performance of the graphics chip according to the individual app installed. This means that we’ll be able to choose to run the GPU at full power only with games or graphics or video editing programs, while we’ll let it “rest” when we use normal productivity programs. It doesn’t make sense for the GPU to run at full power while we’re writing a Word document or filling out an Excel sheet. Apparently there will also be a search box from which we’ll be able to find any app for which we want to choose custom GPU settings.
When it arrives
As we said, the idea isn’t new at all: almost all laptop and desktop graphics manufacturers have, in their driver packages, a utility to select a “profile” of GPU settings for one or more specific apps. In this case, however, the functionality would already be built into the operating system, and this, indirectly, could also mean that Windows 10 itself could decide, if necessary, whether to raise or lower the performance of the graphics chip. However, we shouldn’t hope that this new feature will arrive soon: for it to work and be stable, in fact, Microsoft will have to test it with dozens and dozens of graphics chips and have confirmation of maximum stability on all of them. Also, like any update published in the fast ring, there’s no guarantee that it will actually be implemented.