Fall Creators Update Feature Focus: Task Manager
- Paul Thurrott
- Aug 10, 2017
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16
Power users and gamers will want to check out the improvements to Task Manager in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. It’s a part of Windows that rarely seems to get touched much these days, so it’s nice to see Microsoft turning its attention away from superfluous addition features for a change.
Here’s what you can expect in Windows 10 version 1709.
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Grouped processes. Task Manager now neatly groups processes under apps and services. This is includes the Runtime Broker processes required by UWP apps, which are now listed with their apps, and not separately as a single processes. Group processes works particularly well for apps like Microsoft Edge, where you can even see individual tab names in most cases. And not so well with apps like Google Chrome, where each process is simply named “Google Chrome.”
Power Throttling. With the Fall Creators Update, Windows 10 can now intelligently throttle CPU access to background processes in order to improve battery life on modern PCs. And while this isn’t technically a Task Manager feature per se, you can see which processes are being throttled in Task Manager, too: Just visit the Details tab and enable the Power Throttling column.
GPU performance tracking. Task Manager can now track GPU performance, just as it did previously for the CPU, RAM, disk access, and networking. So each GPU in your PC will show up individually in the Performance tab, and you can see which processes are accessing which GPU, and how much, in the Processes tab.