Why do so many new games not have a fullscreen option?
Why do so many new games not have a fullscreen option?
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 the olden days, Direct3D9 let you bypass the window manager and present directly to the screen if you selected fullscreen, but didn't promise not to crash if you alt tabbed out and in again. When computers got a little faster, and bypassing the window manager wasn't as important, running games in borderless fullscreen windows became a worthwhile tradeoff to avoid the crashes. Direct3D10 and later promised not to crash when switching windows, but took a long time to be adopted as doing so meant you couldn't sell your game to XP users.
With Direct3D12, things were changed so you could still get the minimum latency without traditional fullscreen mode, with its only remaining advantage being that you could set a different screen resolution. That was rarely a good idea, as it was usually better to scale the game internally than to let the monitor do it, and changing the resolution sometimes messes up desktop icon placement and makes the screen flicker for a few seconds when switching modes.
tl;dr: the main traditional advantages of both fullscreen and borderless windowed are now available in both modes, so there's no particular reason to support both.
Thank you for taking the time to explain, that makes sense.
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.
As far as performance goes, I don't think there is much difference
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:
- preventing the cursor from moving to a second monitor and leaving the game
- 1:1 pixel-mapping guaranteed (if running native resolution)
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.
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
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.