[6.20 beta 4] Fullscreen is identical to Borderless (it's not really FSE mode) [SOLVED, I think]

[Daemonjax]

I expected Fullscreen to mean Fullscreen Exclusive mode (like every other game). But it's identical to borderless fullscreen (tested it by disabling aero theme, which causes vsync to not work at all in all games without being in exclusive mode).

This means I'm getting an unnecesary (imo) performance hit because the graphics are forced to go through the dwm process.

This is on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1, 2080ti w/474.11 drivers (this is actually the last WHQL signed driver that works with win7), playing 6.2 beta 4 with all the DLC (and no mods).

[alt3rn1ty]

Until Egosoft reply, there is a workaround I think.
Right click the X4 Icon, and choose properties.
Click the compatability tab
Tick the box for "Disable fullscreen optimisations"

These days I'm not sure its something Egosoft can solve, its something Windows has enforced (probably to do with making Game Bar Overlay work better (from their POV)).

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/ ... mizations/

Not sure about Windows 7, but maybe by now they have updated it to do the same.

[Daemonjax]

Not sure about Windows 7, but maybe by now they have updated it to do the same.

Thanks for the reply, but none of that applies to win7. There is no "disable fullscreen optimizations" (geez, that sounds terrible... is that a thing win10 users do?) or any overlays (yeah, can't do overlays in exclusive fullscreen mode... and any overlay will cause a performance hit in borderless anyways, so they're a bad idea).

It's just a choice developers can make -- just not have a real fullscreen mode. Vulkan CAN do fullscreen exclusive.

[alt3rn1ty]

Ah shame. Well if you ever get Win 11, remember this is an option
https://i.imgur.com/FZA3X4A.png
It became a thing after MS started developing the Game Bar more, I think they were having trouble trying to implement Screenshotting and making in game videos with it.
So by default now every game icon has to have this set manually by the user if you want FSE.

Anyway for your situation, fingers crossed a Dev has a look at this during the week for you.

[Daemonjax]

UPDATE:

This is what additional testing on my newish win10 PC shows...

I can get the game to act like it's using fse mode (at least as much as other games do on win10 -- I get that split second delay when alt-tabbing) but ONLY IF I set my desktop resolution 1920x1080 -- my native res is 1920x1200.

The game seems to think 1920x1200 is a non-native resolution, and so runs in borderless mode even when set to fullscreen, except with the added behavior where it minimizes to the taskbar. It did the same thing on win7... but I never tried setting my desktop resolution to 1920x1080 on win7.

I don't get this behavior on other games.

However, none of that seems to have any significant impact on performance one way or the other for this game for me on win10. It just seems like a weird quirk in this game engine which caused me some confusion... 1920x1200 res isn't common (16:10 aspect ratio)... but it's not super rare, either.

EVENTUALLY, I'll probably get around to testing this on my win7 machine again by 1) setting desktop res to 1920x1080; 2) disabling aero theme; 3) see if vsync still works. If fullscreen really is fse (bypassing dwm), then vsync will still work even with a basic theme.

That's the only way to be sure. But I expect it'll work IFF desktop res is 1920x1080. Perhaps it's more performant on win7, but maybe it doesn't really make a difference either way. I care less now with this newer win10 PC I built -- the game is smooth IFF I force enable DXGI present mode in nvidia control panel, but that seems to be a completely seperate issue entirely. But I certainly wouldn't want to play this game (or any game, really) at 16:9 aspect ratio... I hate 16:9 because of the limited vertical space and that's why I have a 16:10 lcd panel. I blame movies.