The first thing any PC gamer worth their salt will do before diving into a game is setting up everything in the game’s settings menu. In this first stop, you will customize everything to suit your preferences and hardware (hopefully you are able to crank everything to ultra). Besides all of the nitty gritty graphics settings, you will also set up your display settings.
Typically there will be a setting known as display mode. It is here that you will decide to run the game in either Fullscreen, Windowed, or Borderless Windowed.
Depending on your setup or needs you will want a specific one of these options. Let’s take a look at why you might decide to use each one of these options and what they actually do.
Fullscreen Mode
Fullscreen mode is as straightforward as it sounds. The game runs using up the entirety of your monitor or selected monitor(s) (if you have multiple).
The Good
- The most immersive experience. Also a great choice if you have multiple monitors.
- The most performant of these options. Get the most performance out of your GPU.
The Drawbacks
- Desktop notifications can be extra interruptive here.
- If you enjoy older games, alt tabbing can cause issues such as crashing or freezing.
Windowed
With windowed you can run the game in a window of your desired size that you are able to move around your desktop.
The Good
- Perfect for games that you can multi-task while playing, such as turn based games.
- Older games that were built with lower resolutions in mind might look better in certain sized windows. Perfect for avoiding an ugly stretched out look or tiny UI.
The Drawbacks
- Less performance than if you opted for exclusive Fullscreen or Borderless Windowed. Your PC has to render the game and whatever is on the desktop (although most GPUs can handle this no problem these days).
Borderless Windowed
The middle child that everyone seems to love.
The Good
- A great choice for streaming and content creation, you can easily jump between the game and your recording software.
- Crash-free alt tabbing
The Drawbacks
- Notifications can still be annoying.
- Performance TECHNICALLYY is not as good as it could be with Fullscreen. But these days it really does not have that much of an impact.
Which is the best for gaming?
That’s the beauty of PC gaming, that is something for you to decide. We’ve laid out the good and some drawbacks of each option so you can understand what each choice actually does.
Ok so that is a bit of a cop out, we can give you a more straightforward answer if you are looking for that. In general, Fullscreen is the way to go for gaming. It gets the most performance out of your GPU and you can fully focus on your game. But Borderless Windowed gets a special shoutout for it’s flexibility for multitasking. It used to be that borderless windowed had you see a bigger performance hit, but now GPUs are generally so powerful that you don’t see much of a difference unless a game is really poorly optimized. Many people at CyberPowerPC use borderless windowed so that we can jump between our game and other applications with ease.
So get out there, or -er, on your gaming setup and test out each of these options the next time you play a game. You are now armed with the knowledge of what each of these does!