SLI gaming in windowed mode?

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Pesticide

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Jul 8, 2010
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Hi guys, anyone here who can confirm it works for most games? I was very dissapointed it doesnt work for ati crossfire after finding this out on their forum hidden away in a dark corrider after an hour of testing and not being able to figure out why it didnt work. I do almost all of my games in window mode for either livestream casting or the pure hatred of loading screens so i can easily do something different while loading up.

and to make things crystal clear guys, im not asking for no or yes answers, im looking for facts , benchmarks, videos that show how it works , performances losses , etcetera. So i can make up my mind to swap from crossfire to sli based on facts :) thx in advance.
 
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I wasn't aware you could do any gaming in windowed mode. Is that possible with, say, COD MW?
 
almost all older games have starting parameter options to allow them to play in window mode, ranging from hl2.exe -sw -noborder to bf2.exe +fullscreen 0 , just needs a little research and you can run it windowed and there is little to no performance loss (at least on my pc and os winxp32bit) Newer games almost always offer the option in their options menu nowadays.

once you have it up and running you never go back to fullscreen!
 
That would be nice to run windowed mode if it would let you have other windows/apps running at the same time and the ability to click into them w/o causing the game to shut down?
 
thats exactly what it does, game runs in the background, hell you can still even see what happens in the game while surfing the web, swap right back in the action. Super usefull if you need to check up on some quests or tips n tricks on certain games, or need to fix our teamspeak or mumblewhile ingame. No risk of alt tab crashing it either like what happens a lot in fullscreen mode.
 
I don't think SLI works in a window either.

Also, a lot of games support the alt-enter shortcut to toggle between fullscreen and windowed modes, and most have an ingame option to set fullscreen - you rarely have to resort to a start parameter.
 
Pesticide said:
once you have it up and running you never go back to fullscreen!
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Sorry, I toally disagree with this. Windowed mode causes too many issues with too many games and too many technologies to make this worth while. It's MUCH easier to have a portable device next to you to do the things that you desribe and it doesn't impact the gaming experience one bit.
 
Neither SLI or Crossfire work in Windowed mode. So running in either config in a window will hamper your performance.

If you're going to be running in a window anyways, you'll want to have Aero enabled (if you haven't anyway). I find games run overall faster and smoother with it on.
 
heatlesssun said:
Sorry, I toally disagree with this. Windowed mode causes too many issues with too many games and too many technologies to make this worth while. It's MUCH easier to have a portable device next to you to do the things that you desribe and it doesn't impact the gaming experience one bit.
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+1

While right now I have a single computer with two monitors, it's much more convenient to have two separate computers. Alt-tabbing doesn't always work real well, sometimes the game doesn't even want to go back to 2560x1600 (FC2 would go to 1920x1200), and then whenever you alt-tab, especially if the game was running less than desktop res, it always tends to F up things on the 2nd screen, and sometimes the main screen as well.

It's just a hassle. Two separate machines work much better. We tend to upgrade machines so much, why not just keep the ol' machine around?
 
Tried running windowed mode last night in COD 4 and it worked great, thanks! But Windows 7 64bit atomatically disabled aero and went to "basic Mode" or whatever as soon as the game started.

rUmX said:
Neither SLI or Crossfire work in Windowed mode. So running in either config in a window will hamper your performance.

If you're going to be running in a window anyways, you'll want to have Aero enabled (if you haven't anyway). I find games run overall faster and smoother with it on.
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great to hear shawn, did you notice any performance loss ? cause thats a myth in my opinion that windowed mode perfoms worse.

I have no up to date experience with dual screen windowed mode game so cant help you toly. But i remember a lot of trouble with dual screen gaming back when i had 2 crts and i dont think its related to windowed or full screen mode as the second monitor would also get messed up when running a game on the other monitor.

and to make things crystal clear guys, im not asking for no or yes answers, im looking for facts , benchmarks that show how it works , performances losses , etcetera.
 
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Pesticide said:
great to hear shawn, did you notice any performance loss ? cause thats a myth in my opinion that windowed mode perfoms worse.
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It does perform worse, but whether or not it is noticeable or significant is a completely different story.

That said, that came about well before Vista. Before Vista, the desktop was rendered in 2d. Meaning when you ran a game in a window mode, the video card had to keep doing a context switch between 3d and 2d. That switch isn't free, and that is where most of the windowed mode performance was lost. Is it much of a problem anymore? Probably not. Unless you are flirting with the limits of playable framerates, any loss from running in a window will probably go unnoticed.
 
Depends on the game. Some still see huge losses from widowed mode on a single card.
 
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