Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel hope you're all doing well so I recently saw a bunch of people online arguing what else is new about which viewing mode is best for gaming performance the three main options being fullscreen windowed and windowed borderless those last two were kind of the same thing more on that later and while some folks felt there was little to no difference between these modes others reported significant variations in frames per second based on how they were viewing their games the idea here is that when your game is running in full-screen or exclusive full-screen mode the graphics driver has complete control over the screen output when in either of the windowed modes however Windows Explorer acts as a sort of middle man managing where on-screen to draw the output this eats up additional resources which some claim can significantly drop your in-game performance so today we'll run some tests to see if that's really the case we may find that like most of the time it depends things like the game engine itself whether you're running one or more GPUs at a time or even the number of connected displays are all factors that have been reported to cause changes in performance between view modes I'll be running today's tests with my personal setup a single ultra wide display in the form of an Acer predator X 34 and my gaming PC hotlines though I have disabled SLI and will only be using one of its gtx 980ti s so let's dive right into some benchmarks starting with the division here we see some very similar results between all three modes with fullscreen pulling ahead by a very slight margin after re running the games burnin benchmark multiple times fullscreen consistently came out on top with higher scores though you'd never know it from simply playing the game as the results are so closely grouped together doom 2016 also revealed identical performance across the board at this point the results are just too similar to differentiate any real advantage from margin of error in GTA 5 fullscreen barely pulls ahead while windowed and Vorta lists for virtually identical results which isn't too surprising given their outputs are managed by the same process in the desktop windows manager again exclusive fullscreen is the only mode whose input lag is being driven solely by the graphics driver finally I ran hitman to uncover yet again our various modes performing neck and check this was the only game where full screen gets edged out by windowed mode albeit by one frame in average FPS and 1% lows averaging out all the scores we can see that full screen barely outperforms both windowed modes by a fraction of a frame it appears the overhead within Windows Explorer incurs next to no performance loss with the games and hardware tested today of course not every game will give you the same results as I mentioned earlier and some titles just aren't optimized for all viewing modes equally take overwatch for example I actually began testing this game earlier before realizing windowed mode actually shrank the window size and lowered the resolution this yielded much higher frame rate since the GPU had fewer pixels to render which made for an unfair comparison so I tossed the data out some games like overwatch have also been plagued with greater input lag in windowed mode due to windows 8 and 10 forcing triple buffering in the desktop window manager perhaps a follow-up video on input lag specifically is in order once I get my hands on a high-speed camera to properly measure any latency these random quirks make it near impossible to nail down a definitive answer to today's question but based on our results you could make the generalization that exclusive full screen mode ensures you're squeezing every last ounce of performance out of your gameplay though it will likely have little to no impact on your perceptible experience I would think this is good news for streamers and multitaskers who prefer to run their games in windowed or borderless in order to quickly alt-tab between different windows not to mention there's less chance of your game crashing when doing so switching between the graphics driver and dwma exe isn't always a graceful handoff before you guys go though let me know what you think about all this what your experience has been in different view modes have you found a game that performs notably better in one mode over the other feel free to add your own data in the comments otherwise you guys can toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it you can also check out bit with ultra my ad free early access channel for about 30 a month the first two weeks are completely free and you can back out any time as always I'm Khaled big wood thank you guys so much for watching stay tuned for more tech stuff coming at you really soon and I will see you all in the next