This allows games to use refresh rates and/or resolutions not used by the regular desktop, while the composition window manager is still present and able to at any moment step in and start composing if necessary.įor a list of games, see List of games that support windowed. Any 'fullscreen exclusive' mode that DirectX 12 games might feature is in reality a fake/emulated mode where the Windows desktop temporarily changes refresh rate and/or resolution to the one requested by the game, but the compositor otherwise remains in ownership of the display. With the release of Windows 11 22H2 these optimizations were extended to also cover older games running in a regular non-maximized window mode.Īs a result of the compositor optimizations introduced in Windows 10, the Direct3D 12 graphics API was released without any support for the classic fullscreen exclusive mode. To allow older games running in fullscreen exclusive mode to take advantage of these optimizations, Windows 10 v1607 introduced a transparent optimization layer in the operating system called fullscreen optimizations (FSO). Starting with Windows 10 the classic fullscreen exclusive mode was regarded as obsolete by Microsoft as the optimizations introduced for borderless fullscreen games allows for performance and latency equal to that of fullscreen exclusive, while still allowing switching between tasks and applications without any slow display mode switch having to occur. These downsides however have diminished in modern times and as of 2022 most compositors are able to perform some form of optimization or hardware accelerated composition that reduces or outright eliminates the downsides of presenting frames through a regular window. Presenting frames through a window has historically resulted in additional input latency and performance losses due to the need of the compositor to compose the frames presented by the game along with any other windows drawn by other applications an action that were typically performed through software composition performed on the CPU. This in contrast to the classic exclusive fullscreen (FSE) mode on the Windows operating system where the game took ownership of the display device and presented frames directly to the display without involving the compositing window manager, a necessary requirement of the early 3D era due to the lack of a proper hardware accelerated compositor.ĭisplay mode can often be toggled or cycled through using Alt+ ↵ Enter in supported games. Windowed mode and all of its various names or combinations of terms ( bordered, borderless, maximized, fullscreen, windowed, and so on) refers to presenting the rendered frames of a game in some kind of window that is managed by the compositing window manager of the operating system along with the rest of the application windows on the system. 5.2 Force borderless fullscreen windowed mode.4.3 Mouse moves outside of the game window.

Dxwnd borderlands