Exclusive Fullscreen Mode

[Matt_SMS]

Hello everyone –

We want to start off by saying thank you for the great response to the launch! Seeing all the reactions, discussions, and feedback from players trying the game for the first time on PC has been incredible.

One of the requests we have seen frequently come up is to add an Exclusive Fullscreen mode. Considering the prevalence of this request, we want to be as transparent as possible regarding what our team is working on and confirm that we have no plans to add an Exclusive Fullscreen mode to God of War.

We made the decision to go with Borderless Fullscreen based on extensive performance testing and research into to the support capabilities of Windows 10 alongside the fullscreen optimizations done by Microsoft in recent years.

Unlike with past versions of DirectX and Windows, the improvements implemented into the DirectX 11 version that God of War runs upon means that Borderless Fullscreen fully supports VSync, NVIDIA G-Sync, etc. Additionally, we concluded that the upscaling we built into the game (TAA, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR) provided higher-quality upscaling than what a monitor could give running at lower resolutions for performance reasons.

We do recognize that there are some ongoing issues with our implementation of Borderless Fullscreen that we are currently working on resolving. For instance, HDR needs to be turned on at the Windows-level to work properly rather than at the application level, and sometimes the mouse doesn't stay constrained to the game window. We will continue to make improvements towards future-proofing our execution moving forward.

There are some other requests that would require additional examination, such as support for supersampling higher resolutions and then downsampling to a lower resolution to get higher quality than your monitor might support. With things like this, we are more than happy to investigate and see if there are solutions!

If you have additional feedback or requests based on our implementation of Borderless Fullscreen, we are happy to hear it. We want to make the game the best it can be and appreciate your thoughts on what improvements will help us get there.

As always, thank you for participating in the God of War community and thank you for playing our game!

Matt DeWald
Sr Manager, Technical Production
Santa Monica Studio

[space]

if even devs are too slow to adapt to new stuff then it's no surprise that people are even slower

[-=THe M@TRiX=- [DK]]

Thanks, I just need an option to change resolution higher than native (DLDSR). Fullscreen or borderless doesn't matter

Oh, and let's not forget the FOV slider.

[MLGBigSmoke35]

Originally posted by -=THe M@TRiX=- DK:

Thanks, I just need an option to change resolution higher than native (DLDSR). Fullscreen or borderless doesn't matter

Oh, and let's not forget the FOV slider. :2016roasted:

They said in a different post that they are not going to add an fov slider.

[space]

fov slider is never coming as the game was "designed around that camera angle"

you'll have to use flawless widescreen

[AkiraJkr]

W seeing a dev response on this matter! Glad to see the nice response and further insight on what is being done, I'd love to see more devs porting games to PC to follow to this example 😊

[TheRazerMD]

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

Surprised that more people aren't asking for DXGI Flip Model Presentation to be used in games rather than asking for a redundant Exclusive Fullscreen mode. Most DX12 games that offer that option are just changing the monitor resolution and operating with a borderless window rather than actual exclusive fullscreen anyways, and weirdos will take that placebo.

Not sure why they didn't mention it above, but God of War does use DXGI Flip model, and is one of the reasons they aren't looking into implementing Exclusive Fullscreen.

[newworld]

"There are some other requests that would require additional examination, such as support for supersampling higher resolutions and then downsampling to a lower resolution to get higher quality than your monitor might support. With things like this, we are more than happy to investigate and see if there are solutions! "

If there is no solution, it means that exclusive fullscreen mode is better thant borderless and windowed mode.
I expect that you find solution for supersampling because at this moment, the lack of exclusive fullscreen mode is a problem for dlDSR/DSR users.

[RodroG]

Originally posted by AkiraJkr:

W seeing a dev response on this matter! Glad to see the nice response and further insight on what is being done, I'd love to see more devs porting games to PC to follow to this example 😊

This^^. I agree. Thanks to the devs for their agile communication and transparency.

[Kaldaien]

Please DO NOT use NvAPI or AGS for HDR. I will refund this game if you do that. :)

Use DXGI-based HDR and tell users to STFU.

[Unmotivated]

fair, i suppose. thank you for the notification. i've actually been using borderless in more games lately thanks to this topic, and i'm actually wonderfully surprised at how little i can tell the difference between this and fullscreen. my only complaint is some games is that it doesn't register differently from regular Windowed mode on bootup, like Lords of the Fallen, so every time i launch the game i have to change it from and back to borderless in order for it to work again.

[Móres]

please do add supersampling, that would be great

[ZIGS]

No exclusive fullscreen = no buy

[yaoe]

Just let us change the resolution in-game so we don't have to change our desktop resolution every time before launching the game if we want to use downsampling (DSR, DLDSR, VSR, etc). Every other game lets you do this even when they use DXGI flip model (or borderless fullscreen, whatever it's officially called).

[fatezeroxx]

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

Surprised that more people aren't asking for DXGI Flip Model Presentation to be used in games rather than asking for a redundant Exclusive Fullscreen mode. Most DX12 games that offer that option are just changing the monitor resolution and operating with a borderless window rather than actual exclusive fullscreen anyways, and weirdos will take that placebo.

Like the only time I personally use it is when games don't offer built-in supersampling options or don't provide supersampling options in photo mode. Pretty sure at least one of those things are solved in this port.

Originally posted by KingKrouch:

Surprised that more people aren't asking for DXGI Flip Model Presentation to be used in games rather than asking for a redundant Exclusive Fullscreen mode. Most DX12 games that offer that option are just changing the monitor resolution and operating with a borderless window rather than actual exclusive fullscreen anyways, and weirdos will take that placebo.

Like the only time I personally use it is when games don't offer built-in supersampling options or don't provide supersampling options in photo mode. Pretty sure at least one of those things are solved in this port.

DXGI Flip Model has been added to Windowed and Borderless-Windowed mode in Windows 11 Insider dev build, tested some Unity games that G-Sync not working properly before, such as Genshin Impact, G-Sync works perfectly fine now.

[Kurai Shidosha]

I'm just here to prove to you that Exclusive Fullscreen still has merits and is objectively better than borderless windowed (yes, even with "flip" mode) for anyone **who wants to play a game and not constantly alt tab**.

Here are some issues that can occur with borderless windowed mode that do not occur, guaranteed, in exclusive fullscreen:

- DSR doesn't change the desktop but rather just the game
- Mouse cursor doesn't glitch and leave the game window
- Overlays don't popup over the game, affecting controls and taking focus out of the game
- V-Sync has tighter and more accurate frametime matching since DWM still technically has ultimate control in flip mode in order to quickly take over presentation for overlays and alt tabbing
- Performance is still technically ever so slightly higher in exclusive fullscreen
- Absolutely no issues whatsoever with G-Sync vs borderless windowed mode (overlays popping up over the game with flip model disables VRR from syncing and causes judders and disruptions to frame presentation)
- Glitches from games not being designed around FSO Flip Model like crashing on alt tab (doesn't affect GoW but does affect other older games

Above all else, exclusive fullscreen should be an OPTION for the customer to decide. There isn't a single good argument for not supporting it other than sheer laziness from developers. Period. In the meantime, I will be using the power of PC to force my way back into exclusive fullscreen even if you authoritative developers won't natively support it. There are ways to go about hacking it back into the game, even as simply as by using DXVK to force the game into Vulkan API where it can use legacy presentation modes (aka exclusive fullscreen.)

Yes, this is a hill I am willing to die on. No, your opinion on what's best doesn't matter to me.