Alt-tabbing from desktop to game slow

By Excelsis
in PC Gaming

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Excelsis

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Alright, I bought this 4870 about a year ago. Its more or less working fine (for an egg-style XFX cooler model anyways...), I love all the improvements ATI did to their drivers since the 9xxx series (last time I had an ATI card) but there is this really annoying problem that I have never been able to fix or find a fix for.

Alt-tabbing into a game is really slow, sometimes it takes as much as 10 seconds. Older games dont really suffer from this although it seems to be a hit or miss if it will be instant.

What I dont get is that my much older 7600GT, on this very computer, alt-tabs back into the same games instantly, so I really think its an ATI problem. Obviously performance is awful.

As there been any fix or work around (except playing in window mode) found? I'd really like this to be fixed as its quite annoying.

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Excelsis

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^Just tried, sadly it doesn't work.

As for window mode, I'd rather avoid that as I get some input lag when Aero is enabled and disabling it everytime I want to play a game would be annoying.

Apparently this was fixed in a driver set before I bought my card but the problem came back and was never fixed, what a shame.

Guess I'll just have to deal with it for the time being. Thanks anyway.

Grand Master

DirtyLarry Veteran

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  On 23/10/2010 at 14:02, Unimatrix Xero said:

simple dont alt and tab

games are not designed to be alt and tabbed

Huh? I have Alt-Tabbed since I have been PC gaming, and maybe one or two games would flip out over the years, but generally speaking, I have never had issues, and I Alt-Tab all of the time, for launching FRAPS etc.

For example, just the other day was playing a Source based game (Nightmare House 2), and for whatever reason I just can never remember the console command for showing FPS in a source game, so I Alt-tabbed, launched Firefox, googled it real quick, Alt-tab backed, and no problem, except with source games when you Alt-Tab the audio always skips for a second. At least for me.

Grand Master

ylcard

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Not sure how relevant it is to other games, but WoW when in DX11 mode alt-tabs faster than when it's on DX9 mode.

That's fullscreen as alt tabbing in Windowed mode is obviously faster.

When I do alt-tab it's usually for long periods of time, so I'm not worried about the speed :/

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Lazure

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  On 23/10/2010 at 15:08, Excelsis said:

^Just tried, sadly it doesn't work.

As for window mode, I'd rather avoid that as I get some input lag when Aero is enabled and disabling it everytime I want to play a game would be annoying.

Apparently this was fixed in a driver set before I bought my card but the problem came back and was never fixed, what a shame.

Guess I'll just have to deal with it for the time being. Thanks anyway.

While Aero mostly does not interfere with gaming performance noticably, some games are coded in such a bad way that it does wind up interfering with them specifically. Aero can be set to disable automatically when running a specific application. Right click the shortcut to the game > properties. Then go to compatibility tab, and then tick "Disable Desktop Composition". Aero will disable automatically for the specific game in question without you having to deal with it manually. Once you close the game, Aero will return to you automatically. Fullscreen mode in games usually already exhibit this behavior, but this allows you to force it for windowed modes too.

For games that do not have "windowed fullscreen" or "borderless window mode" built-in, there is a program that lets you force this ability called ShiftWindow. First, you set your game to windowed mode in the same resolution as your desktop. This will appear weird and some parts will go off the screen. That is normal. You then tell shiftwindow to hook the running game so it fits it perfectly within your monitor's boundries. This makes alt-tabbing a breeze.

Grand Master

ViperAFK

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  On 24/10/2010 at 16:33, Lazure said:

While Aero mostly does not interfere with gaming performance noticably, some games are coded in such a bad way that it does wind up interfering with them specifically. Aero can be set to disable automatically when running a specific application. Right click the shortcut to the game > properties. Then go to compatibility tab, and then tick "Disable Desktop Composition". Aero will disable automatically for the specific game in question without you having to deal with it manually. Once you close the game, Aero will return to you automatically. Fullscreen mode in games usually already exhibit this behavior, but this allows you to force it for windowed modes too.

For games that do not have "windowed fullscreen" or "borderless window mode" built-in, there is a program that lets you force this ability called ShiftWindow. First, you set your game to windowed mode in the same resolution as your desktop. This will appear weird and some parts will go off the screen. That is normal. You then tell shiftwindow to hook the running game so it fits it perfectly within your monitor's boundries. This makes alt-tabbing a breeze.

Thanks, didn't know about that app!

I really don't know why all games don't have borderless windowed mode in the first place though :pinch:

Grand Master

treemonster

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i alt tab all the time in games. one of the best parts of pc gaming imho.

and i'm not alone. just look at all the qq about ff14 and alt tab crashing the client. ofc you need to be able to alt tab in that game to look up guides for every little thing in that game.

as for porn each streaming video is in it's own tab in firefox so lolz.

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