Fullscreen or Windowed mode?

[Scooby2867]

I recently added another 560ti to my setup with dual monitors and i was wondering if it was better to play in fullscreen or windowed mode? does windowed mode cause lag at all?

 

[jaguarskx]

I would say it depends on the game.

I tested GTA San Andreas in Window mode and it took a performance hit when using the monitor's native resolution. Bringing it down to 1680x1050 greatly improved performance, but it's lower resolution.

I played Fallout 3 and Fallout: NV in window mode @ full resolution. I ALT + Tab out of the game from time to time to do various things like checking on the process of some video encoding in the background. However, ALT + Tab seems to crash these games. Hence, I play them in windowed mode.

Window mode can generally cause lag due because the video card is rendering the game and the desktop.

 

[bystander]

Fullscreen mode, period.

SLI and crossfire do not function in windowed mode, making your 2nd 560ti worthless.

 

[Scooby2867]

Best answer selected by Scooby2867.