Frames per second question, full screen vs windowed

Radium_Angel · July 17, 2020

My windowed (or what the game called "full-screen windowed mode") performance is 3 times better (180FPS vs 60FPS) than playing in actual full screen mode.

Is this normal?

Is it game-based?

System runs 64GB Registered ECC DDR3, GTX 1060 3GB Video card, 2x Xeon E5-2643 v2 CPU (12c/24t total@3.5Ghz)

This is in the whopping *one* video game I play, Armoured Warfare.

Noctua Fan Fan · July 17, 2020

Sometimes it can depend on the game.

Whatever is performing best for you, go with.

Hairless Monkey · July 17, 2020

It sounds like you have v-sync enabled when in fullscreen and not in windowed, or v-sync is on for both and the screen is being set to 60Hz mode when in fullscreen. Like @A Gassy Gnome said, some games prefer full screen, others windowed, but a gap that large indicates that something else is going on.

Radium_Angel · July 17, 2020

7 minutes ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

v-sync enabled

That was my 1st thought as well, but no, it's not on. The monitors are not gaming monitors, so only run at 60hz, so the 60 fps seemed normal. It was only when I (accidentally) set the game into full screen windowed mode that the fps did a triple jump.

This was just idly curiosity, I would have expected the reverse to be true, given that in full screen the PC can devote full attention to the game, as opposed to dealing with Windows and other programs etc, but clearly I was wrong

Eigenvektor · July 17, 2020

That certainly sounds like some form of v-sync is enabled, either in the game (maybe hard coded?) or the GPU driver. When using fullscreen-windowed, the game can no longer access the screen directly, so it's not bound to v-sync anymore and runs as fast as it can.

However, in that case Windows should still limit the frames that are sent to the monitor (since the desktop does use v-sync), meaning you should still only get 60 Hz refreshes.

There was a topic some time ago where someone used both e.g. Afterburner and the in game FPS counter and they showed different values when fullscreen-windowed was used, because the game showed its fps, and Afterburner the actual refresh rate.