Fullscreen or Windowed mode

Can't seem to find a straight answer, but which would lead to better performance? Playing a game in windowed mode or fullscreen (same resolution, graphics settings, background processes etc)

I started to play BF3 in window mode and it does feel smoother but idk if its actually higher performance or i just don't notice the un-smoothness as well since its so small. (720 resolution on a 1080p screen)

 

For best performance you'll have to go fullscreen.

It is indeed true, smaller vids always look a bit smoother.
Just like how smaller an image, how sharper it SEEMS to be

 

Full screen, Best performance.

 

Just use FRAPS to measure FPS.

 

Some games I prefer to play in Windowed mode, others in Fullscreen. Depends on the game type.

 

Tried BF3 on med/low settings at 1366x768 staring at the same spot on an empty server.

Windowed: 49 fps
Fullscreen: 43 fps

Went back and forth on the settings a couple of times to make sure.

Didn't use fraps, just the render.drawfps command in console.

 

Magicka plays good for me only in windowed mode.(Only game)

 

That's weird.

 

yes BF3 is weird, it is the only game I've played which works better for me in windowed mode. (And I am not the only one, I saw somewhere in the 300 pages of the bf3 topic some people had the same "issue", so we use BF3 borderless to stretch completely the frame:

Downloads - BF3 Borderless - Realmware BF3 Tools

 

i think i found out why windowed mode wasrunning faster:

when running in windowed mode (not using bf3 borderless) it uses 1280x720 resolution. increasing the resolution in the options wouldn't change anything and in the options it does say "fullscreen resolution" so maybe the resolution in the options only affects when you're in fullscreen mode. ah well.

edit: also found that setting fullscreen resolution down to 1280x720 yielded similar performance except window mode seemed to have 1 fps higher than fullscreen which is still confusing.