desktop unresponsive

[Theivan170698]

if i alt-tab during the game most of the windows and desktop itself being unresponive, i tried with full screen and borderless but nothing has changed, the only solution i found by myself is to restart the system. By googling for a bit i found a discussion from 2019 with no solution

[Xzit]

Try using Boardless gaming app, it should fix the problem.

[Kornstalx]

Originally posted by Theivan170698:

the only solution i found by myself is to restart the system.

It will appear frozen if you don't have a window open in the background to alt-tab to. If you alt-tab out of Dying Light, and there is nothing behind it, the game will rob your foreground and appear hung. If you alt tab out and forgot to leave something open in the background, you can ctrl+alt+delete and open Task Manager to give yourself a window to then alt-tab to.

This always unsticks the game for me, you don't have to actually close anything or reboot. You just need another window.

[xue]

：）

[Klausmann]

Originally posted by Kornstalx:

Originally posted by Theivan170698:

the only solution i found by myself is to restart the system.

you can ctrl+alt+delete and open Task Manager to give yourself a window to then alt-tab to.

This always unsticks the game for me, you don't have to actually close anything or reboot. You just need another window.

Thank you so much

[DedZedNub]

Originally posted by Kornstalx:

Originally posted by Theivan170698:

the only solution i found by myself is to restart the system.

It will appear frozen if you don't have a window open in the background to alt-tab to. If you alt-tab out of Dying Light, and there is nothing behind it, the game will rob your foreground and appear hung. If you alt tab out and forgot to leave something open in the background, you can ctrl+alt+delete and open Task Manager to give yourself a window to then alt-tab to.

This always unsticks the game for me, you don't have to actually close anything or reboot. You just need another window.

Strong post, Kornstalx, with a very good explanation, better than I would have given.

I often mention this on other Game Forums on Steam, and was just passing thru, thought the same thing.

I do this now by habit now for years, hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and bring up the Task Manager, and for me at least, I've never been unable to ALT TAB. Unfortunately, this is not normally known as a tip -- in fact I never saw someone else post such a reply, let alone explain the actual good reason behind it -- which is taking CPU priority and going to the top of the screen -- that pretty well agrees with what would do it. Well done, Kornstalx. Makes perfect sense.

In fact, this true tip almost seems against the META (and METAs often are dead wrong, for example on how to enjoy a game instead of how to steamroll a game, which might not be fun for a player in reality and might not work with certain differing playstyles from the META), which is why you will see people constantly post about a game should fix the ALT-TAB or Tabbing Out feature of a game. Someone in another forum actually pretended, get this, that there is a known TO abbreviation for this operation -- no, there isn't, not in the common gaming forum vernacular. I have never seen TO posted in any Steam Forum as TO in over a decade here, never in Gamefaqs forum for 2 plus decades, never in the few times I researched the Gog Forums, etc. Doesn't mean it might not have begun being a new abbreviation, like on Reddit or Discord, but I've never seen it and I read game forums hours almost every day or two. But I digress.

Hey, Kornstalx, here's another possible tip you may want to promote, because I just recently did this, not pertaining to this particular bug, but it really surprised me, the improvement.

I run an AMD Radeon 6700 XT, and the latest drivers were 24.7.1 . There were lots of reports of how good it was, but it was terrible for me. Not for FPS per se, but it took forever to go into the System Tray (still is rather slow, compared to my earlier 22.x.x aged drivers). And it seemed that it was using the fan more, not less, and that somehow tasks that disc-accessed a lot, like say lots of looting or games with lots of inventory management, or A.I. decisions for enemies, everything seemed to almost have a short initial stutter to it, not just like for Video Caching Shaders, but all the time, even the occasional keystroke seemed to not quite respond right, was odd, because was good on all this (but not spectacular) before this.

So, Ancient Gameplays YouTuber, mentioned a reminder to update the AMD Chipset Drivers when you do this. Now, sometimes he's a bit off base, especially lately. But given the frequent changing in the AMD GPU DRIVERS to try to maximize how to store things and use the newer A.I. functionality, and storage methods, and all that -- I recalled that I had not updated the AMD CHIPSET DRIVERS for the CPU and Motherboard for 1.5 to 2.5 years, and given all the mess lately with timings for storage, and how to control the bus, and what would be the resultant IO timings needing smarting chunking to synch with that, it sort of made sense that maybe it was time, and I had better do that.

So I updated the AMD CHIPSET DRIVERS from AMD.com, just in case, expecting nothing. However, lately AMD has been very serious about trying to get everything to work, and you can see the reason, as the various new chips coming up, are changing the organization of the boards etc in a big way, plus they want to not pull an Intel problem like those guys just did, and Windows 11 requirements are so oddball, that they have to be pre-emptive.

Anyway, WOW! What an improvement. I play a lot of Generation Zero. It requires looting a lot, and it has to constantly change a region's Threat Level which is a gateway to enemy reinforcement, spawning, and thus loot tables, and minor A.I. selections. Like constant changing tiers in a spreadsheet, in some ways much like a Bethesda Open World setting.

So, after the first 15 seconds, I could not stutter at all, not over known chunk boundaries, not during A.I. decisions, not during scrolling loot, not opening loot, nowhere. I was in literal shock. My mouse moved instantaneously ALWAYS. Usually there is this slight lag, almost imperceptible, but like choosing a new priority or function or device. Nope, gone.

I literally tested it for 4 hours. I mean, I can't explain it. It has to be that the motherboard's chipset working now with the CPU and the GPU -- they know each other/act in synch/the timing is there/no hashing -- it's just unbelievable. And I don't even have Smart Access Memory on in the BIOS, which I should eventually enable, but I don't like playing with BIOS unless I have a good back-up system ready to go and save in case I brick the board.

But I've never run into an issue updating chipset drivers, which you do just like GPU drivers (though I've only done it now 3 times, it should be pretty safe, as the old drivers should fall back, and the motherboard will work without drivers anyway, as it will just load the Windows OS defaults if it can't load the new ones, or last one that was active before it.

Anyway, long post. But, if you do see others mentioning an issue with AMD GPUs chunking or stuttering after recent update to say something this year, you might want to mention to them to try updating to the latest AMD CHIPSET Drivers, this was the latest on there, and it was also WHQL certified.

I mean for me, I felt I had a better than brand new computer with my 6700XT. The fan barely comes on, but that's not important (but suggests something). But it not only is rock solid, it's the lack of any initialization lag, like in looting, inventory, scrolling, like if using branching logic is no problemo, or switching threads. And I have just a Ryzen 3600 6-core, which really rocks otherwise. But this 6700 XT is capable, but sometimes it had begun with newer games to act worse than my 5500 XT, even 1-2 years ago, like after some stupid Windows Updates. Now, I mean ... it acts like the CPU and drive access is just almost twice as powerful.

I've been gaming on computers since the 1980's back to ATARI 1200 XL era. This AMD DRIVER CHIPSET update, may have been the most effective update to improve gaming performance for me with the GPU update, in the last 20 years. I mean, I may have got lucky, but it was way up there.

Anyway long post. Just thought I'd mention it, because your post should help many on ALT-TABBING and that was good to see. You have a good one.