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When playing league of legends I commonly like to google for statistics, such as this article and as such, I play on borderless mode so I can make use of my three screens. Commonly I can be found playing a game on the central screen, watching a movie (netflix) on my right screen and either posting on here, or doing other cool things on the left screen.

However, recently I have found that I am getting problems with my FPS dropping to around 15fps while playing all of my games on borderless mode. These games range from watch dogs, to league of legends, even to portal 2. I am concerned that this was not happening before, and is just happening now. Is there anything I can do to solve the problem? I don't' have any problems in proper full screen mode, but it makes going between screens more tricky.

I have a Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 and I am using three screens running on 1920x1080 resolution. I play all the games at max settings which can be done easily with my Intel Core i7-3630QM processor. Any other technical details can easily be added, if needs be put the other stuff I need to put here in a comment.

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  • First, are talking about lag or about fps issues? Those are 2 very different things. First one is caused by networking, second by the gpu. Second, how much RAM do you have? Browsers in General need between 200 and 1GB of RAM, depending on how many addons are installed and how many tabs are open, so this is a factor. Third, borderless windowed mode is always a tad slower.
    – user28015
    Commented Aug 23, 2014 at 12:17
  • I have 16GB and was talking about FPS problems. I'm completely rebuilding the software on my computer from scratch today, and it seems to have fixed the fps drops. I'll update in a week to see if things have changed.
    – Alexander Craggs
    Commented Aug 23, 2014 at 15:19

3 Answers 3

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With windows 8 and above, the OS can detect when a game is running in borderless windowed mode and give it exclusive GPU access, which means there is no performance penalty. This only works if it is using the full screen, so if you have other things on top (volume indicator/notifications/etc) then it will fall back to normal windowed rendering until the notifications go away.

TLDR; The performance penalties of borderless fullscreen no longer apply in Windows 8+, with the possible exception of with multi-gpu or multi-screen setups.

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Unfortunately when you run in actual full-screen mode, you get exclusive access to the GPU, however is borderless mode you can share it with other processes. As far as my knowledge stretches, there is no way to solve this. It might be best to cut down on using all the programs possible at once, and maybe also to only use two screens.

These factors are out of your control. For anyone else who reads this, and who uses a graphics card that isn't the GTX 690 and has CrossFire support, borderless mode might even further impact your fps because it is not supported.

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  • There really isn't a way. There are three ways of displaying programs (full-screen, windowed, borderless), and all of them have their pros and cons. Borderless having less fps because of sharing the GPU is just borderless' con. While I have no source, I heard that borderless usually only takes ~10% more power to keep the same level of frame rate. If you're getting a huge dip, there might be something else causing the issue. The three screens thing would most certainly be apart of it.
    – Tylor
    Commented Aug 18, 2014 at 19:14
  • I've got 2 gtx460 in sli and borderless is more taxing (I can hear my video card fans roar!) but the fps doesn't dip enough to be a trouble. League and Diablo 3 both run good enough on the same settings. Also, I did that a few times to switch to a multiplayer civ 5 game.
    – Jonathan Drapeau
    Commented Aug 18, 2014 at 19:21
  • Hm, I can play on max settings using full screen mode on league of legends, as soon as I go to borderless mode I can't even play it at the lowest settings.
    – Alexander Craggs
    Commented Aug 18, 2014 at 19:24
  • I know in D3 there's a settings to reduce fps when not focused, so it doesn't eat up GPU when you wanna to other things, can't remember about League having one but it might help you to look for that or a similar settings in the drivers.
    – Jonathan Drapeau
    Commented Aug 18, 2014 at 19:43
  • Hm, I can't see any on my driver, or league of legends, but thanks for trying to help!
    – Alexander Craggs
    Commented Aug 18, 2014 at 19:51
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If you run a game in borderless while using multi gpu, you wil experience FPS drops indeed, this because you tell the GPU to focus on one screen, on one program, but then u start using multiple screens and/or multiple programs....

disable mutli gpu in your graphics settings, and this wil be solved

you won't need multi gpu unless you do some heavy fullscreen gaming with 4k rez, editing or some 3d work

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