frameratewindows
Does running applications in the background on a Windows 10 machine when playing a full screen FPS game affect performance?
For example, I'm playing Squad now on and I sometimes have Chrome open in the background, but it's not clear to me if that can affect frame rate significantly.
I have a simple AutoHotkey script that will force this mode for me. The script removes the window border and title bar of any window, and moves the window so that it fills the screen:
^!f::
WinGetTitle, currentWindow, A
IfWinExist %currentWindow%
{
WinSet, Style, ^0xC00000 ; toggle title bar
WinMove, , , 0, 0, 1920, 1080
}
return
The hotkey this creates is Control+Alt+f. It applies changes to whatever window has focus. If you wanted to use this script, all you'd need to do is:
MaxFull.ahkRun as Administrator.
Note that you'll need to have your game in windowed mode, set to your desktop's resolution. Also change "1920, 1080" to whatever your resolution is. Press the hotkey and bam! Maximized Fullscreen goodness. It even toggles back and forth if you press the hotkey again.
While the hotkey works on many games that I've played, some games are stubborn and don't want the window border removed. In that case, I have another hotkey that is a bit more forceful.
^!g::
WinGetTitle, currentWindow, A
IfWinExist %currentWindow%
{
WinSet, Style, -0xC00000 ; hide title bar
WinSet, Style, -0x800000 ; hide thin-line border
WinSet, Style, -0x400000 ; hide dialog frame
WinSet, Style, -0x40000 ; hide thickframe/sizebox
WinMove, , , 0, 0, 1920, 1080
}
return
Simply append this to the previous script to enable the hotkey Control+Alt+g.
Update: Some games also use a 0x40000 "ThickFrame" style, which the script wasn't removing until now. See the AutoHotkey documentation for a list of styles that can be removed.
Tips on how to improve performance in games, and in Android in General:
Best Answer
It depends.
Everything that's running on your PC will make use of some resources, which means your game won't be able to access those resources. However, if your game doesn't actually need them, it won't be affected much if at all.
So it all depends on how powerful your PC is, how much (and what kind of) resources the game needs, and how much (and what kind of) resources are currently in use by other processes.
There are 3 ways a program can affect a game's framerate. In no particular order:
In most cases, apps running in the background shouldn't affect gaming performance much, unless your PC is very weak and barely meets the game's requirements. Browsers are a bit of a special case, however.
First of all, when using browsers, every site you visit can be considered to be a program by itself. That is, each site (running in each tab) requires RAM. They can each have JavaScript running, which puts load on the CPU. And with WebGL, they can each access the GPU; even without WebGL, they can make use of GPU resources (through CSS animations, for instance).
The best way to know if your browser is impacting your framerate, is benchmarking: Run the game both with and without Chrome running, compare the performance, and decide whether the perceived loss of performance is acceptable or not.
Alternatively, you can open the Task Manager (right-click on your Taskbar -> Task Manager) and see how much resources your browser currently uses. In my case, it uses between 1 and 2% CPU, 0% GPU, and a little above 3GB Memory (RAM). That's a lot of RAM being used, but since my PC has 32GB to spare (and most games don't ask for more than 8GB), my browser's impact on gaming performance should be negligible.