When playing windowed games, other applications and desktop animations can cause significant performance drops.
When playing windowed games, other applications and desktop animations can cause significant performance drops.
I have tested Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft exclusively in windowed mode; all other pure fullscreen titles function perfectly. When either of these games is minimized or loses focus, the overall frame rate drops significantly across all other applications. Scrolling, navigation, closing other windows like the task manager, and even the minimize animation turn into a slow slideshow. Over time, minimizing the game too often—such as when using it for browser access to game information—results in declining performance, sometimes causing complete freezes.
I want to emphasize that this issue does not occur on Windows 10 with identical settings. I also attempted to set a higher frame rate limit for Background FPS without success. My wife upgraded to Windows 11 on the same day and is using the same graphics driver on an RTX 3060 @ 1080p, with identical game settings, and has not encountered any problems.
Do your games run on an SSD or HDD? Also, what space remains on the c: drive and where the games are stored? You have ample memory, so Windows likely won’t require much of a page file. How many browser tabs are active across all windows while playing? That can consume a significant amount of memory at times. Chrome also consumes a lot of memory, which is quite high—check the Task Manager for details. I use Brave, which runs Chromium (similar to Chrome), and currently have 7 tabs open in two Brave windows, but 22 Brave processes are running.