Is there a down fall for running games in Windowed mode?

coolhandm3

coolhandm3

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 28, 2009
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So my monitor will be using a 2560x1440 resolution, if I wanted to run games in 1920x1080p Windowed mode will this hinder gaming performance?

The main goal is that if games dont run well at my native res I want to be able to run them in windowed mode and hopefully get better performance.

So running in windowed mode hinder performance vs running fullscreen??
 
For me, running games in windows mode kills the frame rate. Seems like it's reduced in half. I'm on a crossfire setup, though, so not sure if that matters.
 
When you run in windowed mode you basically turn vsync on since the game now has to have the same refresh rate as your desktop settings. Also, the window will be smaller then the size of your monitor (assuming you run the game at 1920x1080 like you said) unless the game has the ability to resize the window, which most games do.
 
only if you use multiGPU setups. It has a tendancy to only render on one GPU if you do that.
 
When i run games in a window i can't change the brightness :-(
 
I run in windowed mode from time to time. It's good for games that hate being alt-tabbed when they're run full-screen and you have chat convos, downloads, music and school/college/uni assignments you're supposed to be working on all going.
 
When you run in full-screen mode, some games take advantage of framebuffer flipping. That is, they create multiple framebuffers, and render new frames into each one. Then they can just flip between active framebuffers. This has numerous advantages, but primarily is used to reduce latency between frame changes. By simply changing the memory address of the current active framebuffer, switching between frames becomes a very quick and efficient process.

When you run in windowed mode, the game must use the same framebuffer to display from. Even if the game creates and uses other framebuffers, it has to copy frame data into the active framebuffer in order to actually show the frame, which has a degree of latency, and can reduce the apparent framerate, but not necessarily the rendered frame rate.

Of course, the degree to which this happens varies from engine to engine, and from game to game.
 
There is some delay, Mark explains one aspect, another is that the desktop is also drawn, in modern OS's like Vista and Win7 the processes that deal with drawing the desktop are switched off when 3D games are launched.

You'd be better off running full screen and having the graphics card scale the image down to the new resolution, it doesn't look that good but overall I'd say it's an improvement on running in a window.
 
addictedto60fps said:
For me, running games in windows mode kills the frame rate. Seems like it's reduced in half. I'm on a crossfire setup, though, so not sure if that matters.
Click to expand...

Xfire / SLI don't work in windowed mode.

When you run in windowed mode you basically turn vsync on since the game now has to have the same refresh rate as your desktop settings.
Click to expand...

That... doesn't make any sense.
 
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