Fullscreen or Windowed? Which has less lags and faster

[jpxtreme]

just wondering if there are any difference between these two settings. I got a computer that only meets the minimum requirements of the game. So I just want to ask if windowed mode is better? because it;s the default in the game. what are your thoughts?

[silviutu]

Well i don't thinck is ani difference between those 2



Well You Should ask in 2moons-main-discussions-questions/ not Here .....

[BlindGuard77]

Windowed should run slightly faster.

[EliteWarrior]

Are you kidding me or what? Windowed ofcourse has less lags or well less fps loss then FULLSCREEN.

[janvier123]

why does no one seem to know google ?

Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an open source web browser and a mobile phone operating system. Its headquarters, often referred to as the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 (2009 -03-31)[update], the company had 19,786 full-time employees. It runs thousands of servers across the world, processing millions of search requests each day and about one petabyte of user-generated data each hour.[5]

Here are the cliff notes on how things work underneath.

Monitor screen always needs to be associated with so-called primary surface to be able to display anything, i.e. videocard can only scan out of one surface in video memory.

When application is fullscreen (and everything was set up correctly to enable flipping), primary surface is just one of the application backbuffers, and flipped to another backbuffer every frame. It is the most efficient way of presenting on the screen, but it requires application to own the entire monitor area (i.e. entire primary surface).

When there's no fullscreen application and DWM is off, primary surface is owned by OS, and every windowed application performs a blit from application backbuffer to a primary surface. This blit takes some GPU time to complete (as well as blits from the other applications visible on the screen), so it's not as efficient as fullscreen presentation. XP worked that way.

When DWM is composing the screen, things get even more complicated. Here, DWM owns the primary surface and needs to draw application windows there. To make it possible, every window has an associated surface holding its contents, called redirection surface (which allows DWM to enable window ghosting, glass effects, and all that good stuff). Every time D3D application issues a frame, it adds a blit to a redirection surface. That way, several blits need to happen: blit to a redirection surface by the app, blit from a redirection surface to the primary by DWM, which is, again, some overhead compared to fullscreen.

Note all of that additional work is on the GPU, so it doesn't affect CPU performance.