Comparison of window types: windowed, full screen, and borderless.
Comparison of window types: windowed, full screen, and borderless.
For gaming, I aim for optimal performance. These choices really do count. I use borderless mode across most titles because of my setup with several monitors. Your configurations might differ—let me know what you're using!
Performance can improve with windowed or borderless modes, but for me it makes little difference. I prefer borderless when possible, fullscreen during shadowplay, or windowed otherwise. Smoothly switching between in-game and my desktop, browser, Steam, or other platforms is always convenient and reduces the risk of performance issues or crashes from switching tabs.
I frequently choose borderless or fullscreen mode simply to take advantage of alt tabbing convenience.
It used to occur with me when I had my Radeon 6850. During gameplay in fullscreen, the FPS would freeze at 30, while in Borderless it could reach up to 45. Apart from that, I haven't observed any major differences between the two settings.
I've noticed that performance depends on the game engine and the quality of the PC version. Full screen offers full immersion (in windowed mode) and a few games perform slightly better, though only marginally. Running it smaller than your desktop resolution lets you see other applications in the background, and using alt+tab is much more effective in windowed mode. Borderless windowed provides a similar immersive experience to full screen while keeping the window border removed from the program. There’s no universal rule for performance across all games—some run better in full screen, others stay consistent in any mode. Generally, windowed and borderless modes are quite alike as long as the game resolution matches. Borderless is essentially windowed mode at desktop size with the border gone from the program.
I prefer to run games at borderless wherever possible since I tend to alt-tab in and out of games quite frequently. Not only I find its a good convenience (also not having to wait for the monitor to refresh in and out) but some games tend to crash wherever you try to alt-tab out or in some rare cases, getting a minor fps boost.