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Borderless Windowed Fullscreen

R

RedSwirl

Junior Member
I've never had a reason to try it out until now, but I'm having trouble finding information on how to do it for just one game instead of all your games. Specifically I'm trying to get Crysis 2 running in a borderless window. Do games commonly let you do it in options or do you have to use scripts most of the time?

If it matters my GPU is Nvidia, but I haven't messed around with the Nvidia control panel all that much.
 
S

Silky

Banned
Certain games have it, but really a lot of games should have Borderless Windowed as an option. It's so good.
 
R

Ricerocket

Member
Borderless Fullscreen is soooo good especially for multi-monitor setups.

Unfortunately I think it's game by game basis.
 
Pegasus Actual

Pegasus Actual

Member
ITADAKIMASU said:
Borderless Fullscreen is soooo good especially for multi-monitor setups.

Unfortunately I think it's game by game basis.
Click to expand...

Windows 8.1 has made it a lot less useful, the handy 'click on taskbar on other screen to get the taskbar to pop over the game' trick doesn't work anymore like it did in 8.0 and 7. Anyone have any ideas for workarounds? Best I've come up with is having a window on the screen with the game that I can alt+tab to, which will bring the taskbar back but it's not exactly ideal.
 
D

Durante

Member
Some games can do it natively, for some you can enable windowed mode and then force borderless fullscreen using an external tool.

Advantages:
- automatic triple-buffered V-sync (you can disable any in-game V-sync options)
- seamless alt-tabbing
- uses your desktop refresh rate, which some games might not correctly recognize in fullscreen mode
- plays nice with multi-monitor setups

Disadvantages:
- some (mostly minor) performance loss
 
C

Cannon Goose

Member
So I've decided to try out borderless fullscreen and I'm noticing that it seems to introduce a fair bit of stuttering into every game. Is this normal? The frame rate stays at 60 (capped with MSI Afterburner, vsync is off) and I can move the camera over an area a dozen times and four of those times it'll stutter as it moves.
 
T

TAJ

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Nice. Now I can play Shadowman. There's no fullscreen option in that game. Or maybe there is but it doesn't work. I don't remember. Same difference.
 
C

Cannon Goose

Member
Cannon Goose said:
So I've decided to try out borderless fullscreen and I'm noticing that it seems to introduce a fair bit of stuttering into every game. Is this normal? The frame rate stays at 60 (capped with MSI Afterburner, vsync is off) and I can move the camera over an area a dozen times and four of those times it'll stutter as it moves.
Click to expand...

I managed to fix this by also running triple buffered vsync while using borderless windowed mode. Not sure why that helps because now it's running vsync twice (in the OS and from Radeon Pro) but it certainly did the trick.

I'm using this utility which is working out pretty nicely. It has some helpful options like automatic window size and placement as well as a stripped down version of DXWND (a program that forces windowed mode for games that don't support it) built into it.

Now that I've got it working nicely I'm not sure I can ever go back to fullscreen gaming.
 
C

Chev

Member
RedSwirl said:
Didn't know it had an affect on performance.
Click to expand...

Non-windowed fullscreen is exclusive fullscreen. In other words your program gets priority over almost all others and they won't even run window drawing routines in the background unless you lose focus. The whole GPU is your slave. On the other way it doesn't play nice with other programs at all.

Windowed fullscreen is just that, a window that covers the screen. It comes with all the window advantages and multitasking but on the other hand it has to play nice and share all resources on an equal footing with other windows. So overall you need more performance to run the same program.
 
Haunted

Haunted

Member
Borderless windowed fullscreen was the only way I got Rising Revengeance running properly.

With the multi-monitor setup I'm running, any game that offers this out of the box nets a major plus in my book.
 
D

DrNeroCF

Member
RedSwirl said:
By the way I'm doing this to try to get around Crysis 2's 24Hz HDTV bug.
Click to expand...

I had that problem... Pretty sure the solution I found was to set up a custom resolution of something like 1918x1080 in the NVIDIA panel.

With Crysis 2 I had to turn VSync off and on again, maybe a few times, to get the game to run smoothly, not sure if it was 24hz or another problem, though. Crysis 1 definitely was.
 
F

Fafalada

Fafracer forever
RedSwirl said:
Didn't know it had an affect on performance.
Click to expand...
It depends on the game and OS you're running on - there are cases in Windows7/Vista where it'll actually improve performance(or have no effect whatsoever), for XP it's a decrease though.
 
RuneFactoryFanboy

RuneFactoryFanboy

Member
Flying Wonkey said:
I normally use this and it works fine for me on most games.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2675769
Click to expand...
I just found this about a week ago.

I've been playing Ragnarok Online and it's a blessing. Ragnarok Online being an old PC game has serious frame rate issues running in it's native full screen mode. So I set the game to Windowed mode at my full desktop resolution, start up this utility and it now runs full screen smooth as butter.

I'm definitely keeping this utility around in case I run into another game with full screen problems.
 
A

Agent Gibbs

Member
for some reason i have to use it for skyrim....
I've got a lot of texture mods which skyrim and my rig can easily handle, unfortunately i installed about 6 mods one day and after the frame rate dropped to about 19fps and it occasionally dropped into single figures.
Removing the mods didn't fix the issue (admittedly i used a mod manager and it could have left remnants) after a bit of googling, others had had similar issues which borderless windows had solved.
Once using a borderless window it solved my performance issues and it was running at 45-60fps, thats with real tree mods, real grass mods, real particle mods, fire mods, ENB everything really to make it seem 10 times better than vanilla


conversely

on Tomb Raider i can run it on ultra locked at the 60fps and its amazing
Tried it on windowed...couldn't play it on ultra had to switch to high


all sounds very first world problems though
 
B

b&jy77VjiKn$#F

Member
I tried this and found it extremely useful for Garry's Mod. Every time a server switches to a new map, I can do something else while waiting for it to download. Also some games I have problem forcing a specific resolution, borderless mode is likely the viable solution.
 
F

Fuu

Formerly Alaluef (not Aladuf)
I should start looking into this. I play with normal fullscreen on the TV while leaving fb chat and twitter open in a second monitor, and it gets grating having the game minimizing whenever I need to type something on those windows.
 
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