Resolutions
Video settings
Hardware
Key points
- Fast, seamless task switching with no risk of crashes or freezes with no performance costs.
- Eliminates screen tearing.
- AMD/ATI cards do not support Crossfire in this mode.
- Most games will have problems with edge scrolling on multi-monitor setups.
Windows
- Open source and simple to use application.
- Dynamic, adapts easily when switching to a different resolution on another monitor. A manual toggle is also avaiable.
- Customizable position axis and resolution size.
- Slightly buggy, can get messy to use, no longer supported.
- Full of customizable features.
- Lightweight easy to use utility, useful for TVs.
- Manually completely override the size of a game's border sending it off screen.
- Slightly overly complicated, not compatible with certain games.
- Games built on the Unity engine can be run in a borderless window by adding the launch argument
-popupwindow
to the main executable and checking the 'windowed' option in its launcher.
Forced windowed mode
- Great for older games which have no native windowed mode support such as the Black & White series.
- Allows to have and use multiple configurations at once.
- On certain cases it might even fix performance issues allowing older games to get past 30 FPS and such.
- Might appear complicated to use at first.
- D3DWindower has to be run with admin rights on. See Windows compatibility mode.
- 3DAnalyze has many features alongside a forced windowed mode.
- Great for Win95/98 like games such as StarCraft, Diablo and Quake.
- Presets already included.
- Slightly buggy interface, in-game performance might get worse.
AutoHotkey
- Either AutoHotkey L or Basic are required for the following scripts.
- Games utilizing PunkBuster as an anti-cheat measure may mistakenly treat AutoHotkey as a cheat.
Saving and running a script
Scripts compilation
Borderless scripts
Fullscreen script
- This script will full screen the currently active window onto your primary monitor with the F12 key
Fullscreen toggle script
- This script will toggle between fullscreen and windowed modes when pressing F12 as well as hiding the taskbar on the fullscreen mode.
Multiple monitors script
- This is a snippet from the Fullscreen toggle script.
Linux
- Most Linux windows managers allow fullscreen applications to natively run under a borderless mode by default.
Another tip that exclusively works on Linux is running your game in a separate X server. This allows you to switch between your game and your desktop using CTRL+Alt+F7/F8 and it increases performance and stability. To do this, edit the launch options for your game on Steam as follows:
References