Ok hello all! I recently or not so recently made a point on the crossovers preview page talking about game mode.
here: https://www.codeweavers.com/preview/forum/?t=46;mhl=310784;msg=310784#msg310784
Now some good points were made here in that it remains paused when you swipe away, this is true, but that's the process priority or something game mode is doing to the relative process directly, it being paused is a good thing, since its away- at least this is all assumption since the performance gains are still there despite it being passed. that said, ive managed to garner some new information and that was the whole apple priority thing. ie: -20 being top, 0, average, and 20 minimal.
I have made a script here, that deprioritizes chess, and allows you to prioritize your running process!
https://gist.github.com/NextdoorPsycho/013ad83455c8492888c9c424d7695dd7
So as a gist, for the gist what it SHOULD do, is the following:
1: Open chess
2: Fullscreen chess
3: Deprioritize chess
4: take you back a screen / out of fullscreen.
5: Allow you to target any running process, like Safari or whatever (likely your game) and you can set the priority of this running process.
6: Close
Since all of the setting changed are static process changes you would need to rerun it every time you open a process butits changes are like that until the process closes or reopens. Again, the gains from this are Minimal, but still not something that should be ignored. it's tricking the MacBook into doing what we want until crossovers comes up with a solution to this.
Your mileage may vary but in the games I tested in the aforementioned notes ie:
In Control for example I went from an average on medium at 136, but when I toggled the game mode I was at around 142 to 146. So it's not something small at all, or 15fps gain in bg3, etc... was something along what I said.
I think this is something worth the share, Sorry it took so long!
I also am actively reading these comments now, since I had no notifications working last time haha.
And if anyone at crossovers is reading this, according to some places on GitHub:
<key>LSApplicationCategoryType</key>
<string>public.app-category.games</string>
might be a helpful add in the plist. (DISCLAIMER: im less familiar with this side of development so im not going to say THIS IS WHAT WE NEED or anything because I genuinely do not know, and am only trying to spoof game mode, nothing more, and I would imagine that the lovely people at crossovers/wine are far more aware on the situation than I am.)
Also P.S. I'm posting this here now to reach you guys since I think the preview is locked to only preview people, but I don't know. nevertheless this should be more available! also Andrew Tsai is the sole reason im even working on things like this to begin with. #shoutout, great guy/content!
Edit:
Also as a BIG Note to add-on to this, this is contingent on the game, and will not at all work to better the performance of all games, and is 100% dependent on if the game WOULD gain anything from game mode in the first place / the performance shifting from cpu to gpu and vice versa. for example in Skyrim I net worse performance, while in control its better. so this is highly dependent on the game / system. but its free to try this script and it may garner you better performance, and may not. nevertheless its a nice thing to try.
Cheers y'all!