What it does…
Rainmeter uses very few resources to run which makes it a very popular customisation program for your desktop. However it can still affect gameplay by causing stuttering – especially if you have a lot of skins running. Instead of exiting the program to play your game and starting it again after, Rainmeter comes with an option called Game Mode. This allows you either turn off all your skins while playing, or load only specific skins allowing you maximum resources for your gaming. Although it is called Game Mode, you can also use the facility for any program you wish to have running (for example setting up a distraction free layout when you’re working on your writing or spreadsheet work!).
Setting up Game Mode…
As mentioned above, game mode unloads all of your currently running skins and so you will want to save all of these as a layout. This saves all of your currently loaded skins together with their location on the screen. To do this, right click on the Rainmeter icon (the one that looks like a raindrop!) and select ‘Manage’. This will bring up the Manage Rainmeter window and you can now click to the Layout tab as shown in the figure below:
Here you can give your layout a name and save it. This can now be used when setting up the game mode feature. Next, we click on the ‘Game mode’ tab which is where the magic happens as can be seen below.
You can see that Full-screen games has been selected, but if you like to run your games in borderless window mode, or you wish to have other programs included then you can add these by turn on Additional process list (by clicking the box to the left of it) and then entering the program name in the box. The best way to do this is to have the game/program running and looking in task manager or file manager to see the name of the program filename. For example, if you wish to add LibreOffice spreadsheet to the list, you would just type: soffice.bin.
In the ‘On start’ dropdown select ‘Unload all skins’, and in the ‘On stop’ dropdown select the name of your layout that you created above. And that’s all there is to it. You can now click ‘Close’, and now whenever you run any game/program listed all skins will be unloaded and will be reloaded when you have exited them.
You may have noticed that in the ‘On start’ dropdown you also have a choice of selecting another layout. This can be useful if, for example, you want to load specific skins to be shown while playing your game (useful if you have more than one monitor) such as GPU temperature/usage, etc.