Newest example I’ve seen is SF6, your options are windowed or windowed borderless. Hogwarts legacy also does the same. Why the hell is this?
btw alt+enter doesn’t work
I hate it because it means I have to alt tab when I want to pause a video on a secondary monitor. I also thought the common wisdom was that fullscreen mode yields the best performance and lowest latency. Is this no longer true?
Thanks in advance!
Do you not have to alt-tab when you want to pause a video on a secondary monitor when you are in full-screen mode? How do you get focus on the video player?
As far as performance goes, I don’t think there is much difference. And if they are only going to add full screen or borderless, borderless is the one most people are going to want.
I personally prefer borderless as tabbing in/out of the game is instant and leaves the view up, which is great if you need to take notes on something in the game.
In fullscreen mode, resources are dedicated to rendering just that game. In windowed mode, resources are being used to render the desktop, etc. Think of fullscreen mode as a sort of “exclusive access” mode of the GPU.
Also, in windowed mode, there will almost always be more input lag, as Windows forces triple buffering (last I checked) in windowed mode.
Other benefits of fullscreen gaming include:
This is out of date - things changed with D3D12 and now fullscreen mode isn’t any faster and doesn’t totally disable the windowing system.
Also, there’s been a function to lock the cursor to a particular window in all major operating systems for ages, and window APIs don’t let you open windows whose corners aren’t at pixel boundaries, so you’ll always have a 1:1 pixel mapping unless the developer messed something up or created their application before display scaling was common.
That’s what I thought. Seems bizarre to me to not include the option in a game, it can’t be difficult can it?
Thank you for the info by the way
At least on Windows 11, there’s an option called like “Optimizations for Fullscreen games” where you can have screen tearing on borderless windowed games that are not DX12. Performance wise, OP would want to turn on this option if they have it available.
One tradeoff with full screen though that is a known bug that has yet to be fixed is when using fullscreen on a monitor that requires DSC to hit a resolution/framerate/color config in order to be fun (see Nvidia DSC bug). It causes some users with multiple screens to have 5 seconds pf black screens when tabbing in and out of games.
I have a fightstick in my lap and a keyboard on my table. If I focus the video the controller still works (on the fullscreen game on a seperate monitor), but I can also tap space, arrow keys, m for mute, c for captions etc. without the need to alt tab or use the mouse.
That’s down to the app choosing to ignore controller input when its window doesn’t have focus rather than it not being fullscreen.
Well it works 0% of the time if it’s not fullscreen. Not a big deal I was mostly curious about why it was no longer deemed necessary