Despite being one of the biggest social communication platforms among gamers, Discord is infamous for using up a huge chunk of your system’s resources when gaming, often leading to a significant hit in your PC’s performance. Luckily, the company now appears to be working on a fix.
As per a recent report from multiple sources, Discord is testing out a new feature called “Game Mode” within the app, and it’s expected to automatically lower Discord’s CPU and GPU usage whenever the app notices a game running.
This feature was first reported by X user Discord Previews, an account that tracks experimental features for Discord. A screenshot shared from the account in an X post showed an “Enable Game Mode” toggle with its detailed description.
How Discord’s Game Mode Works
According to the description, whenever Discord detects that a game is running on your PC, the client would scale back animations and switch off certain effects, leaving more power for the game.
Discord already has a Reduced Motion setting that does something similar, and you can turn it on via the settings menu. However, Game Mode would make those changes automatically only when it detects a game is running. It would go back to normal once you close the game.
Should You Use Discord Game Mode?
Anyone with an older PC or a gaming laptop should likely be able to notice a major improvement in your game’s FPS count upon enabling Discord Game Mode, since running several apps at once has a bigger impact on lower-end machines.
Also, if you play competitive games like Counter-Strike, Dota, or Marvel Rivals where every frame matters, you’ll want to enable game mode in your Discord.
That said, note that there’s still a lot of uncertainty about this feature. For starters, Discord hasn’t even officially announced the feature, which means that there’s no release date at the time of writing. It’s also unclear which effects will be disabled or how much of a difference it will make. Additionally, the most common complaint among Discord users is the amount of RAM it consumes, and so far nothing suggests that RAM consumption will go down when using this mode.
