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!
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This is out of date - things changed with D3D12 and now fullscreen mode isn’t any faster and doesn’t totally disable the windowing system.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.
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.
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