Borderless mode on games causes lag

pcperformance

When playing league of legends I commonly like to google for statistics, such as this article and as such, I play on borderless mode so I can make use of my three screens. Commonly I can be found playing a game on the central screen, watching a movie (netflix) on my right screen and either posting on here, or doing other cool things on the left screen.

However, recently I have found that I am getting problems with my FPS dropping to around 15fps while playing all of my games on borderless mode. These games range from watch dogs, to league of legends, even to portal 2. I am concerned that this was not happening before, and is just happening now. Is there anything I can do to solve the problem? I don't' have any problems in proper full screen mode, but it makes going between screens more tricky.

I have a Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 and I am using three screens running on 1920×1080 resolution. I play all the games at max settings which can be done easily with my Intel Core i7-3630QM processor. Any other technical details can easily be added, if needs be put the other stuff I need to put here in a comment.

Best Answer

With windows 8 and above, the OS can detect when a game is running in borderless windowed mode and give it exclusive GPU access, which means there is no performance penalty. This only works if it is using the full screen, so if you have other things on top (volume indicator/notifications/etc) then it will fall back to normal windowed rendering until the notifications go away.

TLDR; The performance penalties of borderless fullscreen no longer apply in Windows 8+, with the possible exception of with multi-gpu or multi-screen setups.