What if I told you there are legitimately secret hidden performance settings in Windows that can
only be revealed using commands in the command prompt. It's true, here are all the visible
power and performance settings in Windows by default, and here are all the possible ones,
there are SO many more, including all these processor performance settings. So that's
what we'll go over today, because I only just found out about these myself, so I just had to
make a video about them, and of course I'll show you how you can see them for yourself.
Oh and this video is sponsored by World of Tanks, I'll talk about that later.
So you're probably wondering what these settings are for, and why they're hidden. As you can see,
they're actually found in the advanced Power Options menu for the various power
plans in Windows. The default plans you may have seen are Balanced, High Performance,
and Power Saver. There's also the "Ultimate Performance" mode but I'll mention that
later. And to get to them you just go into the Control Panel, System and Security,
Power Options, Change Plan Settings, then Change Advanced Power Settings.
In my case there were 28 settings visible by default, but if you include the hidden
ones there were 132! There are even a handful of entirely new groups of settings,
such as Idle Resiliency, Interrupt Steering Settings, Graphics Settings,
and Presence Aware Power Behavior. And I'll go over some of the more interesting
settings in a bit. Though some only show up depending on your computer, like this one for
Intel Graphics which will only appear if you have an Intel CPU with integrated graphics.
As for why these settings are hidden in the first place? Well realistically,
you probably don't want to mess with many of these, if any at all. And since 99.99% of people
will have no idea what these even do, let alone how to optimize them, plus the fact that changing
them could really throw off your computer's performance, it makes sense they'd be hidden
away. I mean have you ever heard of "Processor Idle Resiliency Timer Resolution"? Me neither.
That being said, I still think you should at least know about them, especially if you'd
consider yourself an 'advanced user'. Because while looking through these right now you likely
won't have a reason to change anything, it's possible you'll come across some obscure problem
in the future where one of these might come in handy. So it's better to know they exist, but
again with the understanding that you shouldn't change them unless you have a specific reason to.
Next I'll go over how to enable the settings, but first I want to thank today's sponsor,
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And with all that being said, let's continue
Before we go into some of the specific settings, I may as well show you how to enable them,
but it is a bit involved. To simply see a list of all the hidden settings and their current values,
we can use the 'powercfg' command in the command prompt. Normally the
parameter you'd use to see the current settings is the /Query parameter,
or /Q. And then you can see it shows a list of the different settings,
the possible values, and the current setting if the computer is plugged in, vs on battery.
But that /Q command still only shows the settings that are already viewable in the GUI. So instead,
we need to use an even more hidden command that is not even listed in the list of commands,
which is /Qh. And this will show you all the settings, including the hidden ones. Though keep
in mind this only has the command prompt show all the settings, it doesn't actually enable them yet.
Another useful tip though, is if you want to output the results into a text file instead
of just showing it in the terminal window, you can add a greater-than
sign after the command along with the path of the file you want to save it
into. So writing the commands like this will save them onto the desktop as text files.
Now as for getting these settings to show up in the power settings window,
how it works for an individual setting is you'd do this command. "Powercfg -attributes",
then the Alias of the subgroup, or the subgroup's GUID which is the big string
of letters and numbers, then the GUID of the individual setting, and then to unhide the
setting you put [minus] "-ATTRIB_HIDE", or to re-hide it, you'd put [plus] "+ATTRIB_HIDE".
Obviously with 100+ hidden settings this would take forever, but there are scripts
like this one which use powershell to get all the power settings on your computer,
and then generates another script you can run to unhide every single one.
Now I'll put that link in the description, BUT I would NOT recommend most people do that, because
you can't just reverse it. You see, that script just runs the un-hide command on all settings,
whether they're already visible or not. So if you tried to just reverse it by changing
all the commands to re-hide them for example, you would literally hide every single power setting,
including ones that were visible before. And you can see, that's what I did here for a
demonstration, they're all gone. So your only option would be to unhide everything again.
So instead what I think you should do is just use that text file with all the settings,
and if you ever need to change one of them, you can just enable only that one, or a few settings.
That way you don't clutter up your power settings with a hundred of them you're never going to need.
So next why don't we take a look at some of the more interesting settings in here. Though again,
I'm not saying you should change any, we're just looking. Under Hard Disk there are settings for
both hard drives and SSDs. There are a bunch of settings mentioning "APST ITPT", which
I found out stands for "Autonomous Power State Transition" and "Idle Time Prior to Transition"
which apparently have to do with how long the drive is idle before changing power states.
Under Sleep it mostly seems to be settings have to do with whether certain sleep policies are
allowed or not. And under USB it's mostly to do with selectively suspending devices,
like those that are idle. I looked up these "IOC" and "TD" terms, which seem to stand for
"Interrupt on Change" and "Transfer Descriptor", but as for what this does, I have no idea.
Idle Resiliency is an entire new settings group that showed up, and appears to have
settings related to the computer's standby modes, and specifically when to not go into
standby - I think. For example, apparently programs can issue 'power requests' that
prevent the computer from turning off the display, going to sleep, stuff like that,
so this setting I guess is for that. But I have no idea why the default setting is 136 years.
Interrupt Steering Settings is also a new group, but I had a hard time finding these
even being mentioned anywhere, let alone what they do. I did find a paper made by
Intel for developers that basically said "don't mess with this stuff,
let Windows handle it", so that's what you should probably do too.
Now the Processor Power Management group is pretty interesting because by default it just
has two settings, minimum processor state and maximum processor state. And if you want to max
things out, just use the high performance plan which puts both at 100% so your CPU is always
running at full frequency if you don't care about power usage or battery life.
But there are a ton of hidden settings as you can see. A lot of them have to do with something
called "Core Parking" where basically certain cores go into a sort of sleep mode. I wouldn't
even mess with these settings, because if you really want to get the maximum performance from
a computer and don't care about power consumption, you can just go into your
BIOS and disable "C-States" altogether, which are lower power states for cores,
including parking. LinusTechTips actually did a video where his computer was having weird issues,
and disabling C-States fixed it, so I'll have a link to that pop out and
in the description if you want to learn more about that, it might be worth considering.
But yea this section has too many settings to cover, and if all you want is the highest
performance, well the "high performance" plan seems to max out anything important anyway.
Under Graphics Settings, this might only show up if you have multiple GPUs,
but it lets you set a preference for a low power GPU if you want,
like on my computer it considers the integrated GPU as power saving which makes sense. Though
interestingly the only other option is None, so I guess it defaults to the high performance one.
Under display, nothing too crazy here. For example this advanced color quality one
apparently has to do with whether the OS will use HDR and a wide color gamut for certain content,
or be biased towards power saving battery. Though not sure how much that even makes a difference,
because even in the power saving power plan it's still set to visual quality.
That last new settings group is "Presence Aware Power Behavior",
though some of these might show up by default for devices if it has a so-called "presence sensor",
which seems to be mostly a thing for laptops. Anyway these apparently have
to do with power saving actions based on whether you're in front of the computer
or not, like whether it turns off the display when you walk away for example.
So those are all the settings that were hidden before, but one thing I noticed
is that some settings will show in the list printed out by the command prompt,
but still won't show up in the power settings window even if you unhide them. For example
the entire group of battery settings doesn't show despite being listed, which makes sense,
the computer has no battery. There are also some display settings like Display Brightness and
dimming settings, which I assume only shows up on a laptop or tablet where the OS has control
over the screen brightness. There might be more but I didn't look through every single one.
Ok now one thing you might be wondering about is that "Ultimate Performance" power plan,
which is actually built into Windows, but only shows up by default if you're
using the Pro for Workstations or Enterprise editions of Windows. Though there are articles
that show you how you can easily enable it yourself on any edition,
I'll put the link in the description. Microsoft said that this ultimate performance plan was
built upon the High Performance plan, but it was optimized to reduce micro-latencies.
But what exactly is the difference with the 'Ultimate Performance' mode? That's actually
what got me started with this video, because if you just look at the default power options,
it seems exactly the same as High Performance, except it disables your hard drive from going
idle, that's it. I figured there had to be more behind the scenes,
which is how I came across all those hidden power settings. And I thought, 'Ah it all makes sense,
all the differences are just in the hidden settings!' Except... there still weren't any.
I exported all the settings for both the high performance power plan and the ultimate
performance plan, and they are literally exactly the same except for that one setting for hard
drive idle time. And yes I'm using a legitimate activated Enterprise edition of Windows 11, so if
you were wondering if I had to use that command to enable Ultimate Peformance mode and maybe
it wasn't the "real" mode? Nope that's not the case. I even made a virtual machine with the 2018
version of Windows 10 Pro for Workstations right after the ultimate performance mode was released,
thinking maybe at the time there were differences but not anymore. But nope, back then same thing.
So I am truly puzzled. I have no idea whether somehow this Ultimate Performance
mode somehow activates some code behind the scenes not related to power settings,
but I would be really surprised if that was the case. Or it might just be 100% marketing, so
people feel assured they are getting the absolute most from the computer even though they were with
high performance too. Or maybe it's there in case in the future there are settings where it will
be different. In any case even if it is placebo, I'll still keep it on that mode because why not.
So now you know more than you will likely ever need to know about Windows power settings, but at
least you can keep it all in the back of your head just in case. You never know, maybe you'll need to
impress your boss or a friend with your expert computer knowledge. But like I said you probably
don't want to mess with those anyway unless you have a specific reason and know what you're doing.
Thanks again to World of Tanks for sponsoring, be sure to check out the link in the description
and use the promo code TANKMANIA for all those bonuses I mentioned before.
So if you guys enjoyed this video be sure to let me know down in the comments, especially
if you know something about the settings that I didn't. Also be sure to give the video a big
thumbs up for the algorithm, and maybe check out some of my other recent videos and consider
subscribing. If you want to keep watching the next video I'd recommend is where I talked about
why storage drives in Windows seem to be smaller than advertised, it's probably not what you think.
I'll put that link right here. So thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.