Windowed vs Fullscreen

[AeonicWeapon]

Not sure whats going on with my graphics card. And I'm constantly being told different things by people. So, can anyone tell me definitively what is less stressful for a computer? Fullscreen or Windowed? or is there even any real difference?

[Vesuvius]

I play windowed/fullscreen. It makes alt/tab'ing out of game so much smoother.

[Primus]

Windowed fullscreen puts atleast another %50 input to cpu. All to be honest I always found hard to play ark above 40 fps in that mod. Fullscreen for pure performance without too much stress on cpu. A tip, make you game windowed/fullscreen in mainmenu, load map/server, you can alttab while loading easily unlike fullscreen and turn it back to fullscreen when online

[AeonicWeapon]

And its only a CPU issue that it would help as far as going fullscreen? I keep getting "video driver has crashed and reset make sure your driver is up to date" error after playing for a random amount of time. Would going true fullscreen help that at all?

[[☥] - CJ -]

Windowed is less stressful of sorts, GPU usage may not max out as it would with Fullscreen.

[AeonicWeapon]

Fml, guess my GPU is fkd then....or Ark just doesn't like AMD one or the two....thats frustrating granted its not a particularly old one nor have i used it enough to warrant it going out. or whatever the heck the issue may be with it.

[g0rml3ss]

I find windowed has a negative effect on fps in ark (I get less in windowed fullscreen than I do in fullscreen).

May well be your gpu as ark works fine on AMD (depending on the card you have of course)

I use an R9 390 can run ARK @ 3200x1800 downscaled to 1080p at 40-50fps on a mix of High/Epic settings with shadows & post processing on medium.

In windowed fullscreen I get about 30fps.

[Waldherz]

Your final answer: WindowedFullscreen = smoother tabbing in and out
True fullscreen = better performance.
UNLESS you run on a very bad PC. then the windowed mode might actually help. No joke.

[Waldherz]

Originally posted by xbmitchx:

Fml, guess my GPU is fkd then....or Ark just doesn't like AMD one or the two....thats frustrating granted its not a particularly old one nor have i used it enough to warrant it going out. or whatever the heck the issue may be with it.

Its not AMD. Look at my rig. I have 30fps max int he jungle on low ot medium settings.

[Spawn of Fenrir]

I play on Windowed/fullscreen because I like to Alt/Tab alot to look at internet browser or whatever..... I did find that Fullscreen got me a few more FPS, and generally just had a smoother feel, but the difference is pretty small that I'd almost call it negligible. the game runs fine for me either way, so I choose the mode that offers me the most convienience.

[Armitage Shanks]

Originally posted by ☥ - CJ -:

Windowed is less stressful of sorts, GPU usage may not max out as it would with Fullscreen.

This would depend entirely on the resolution of the windowed game. If you're playing with the same resolution in windowed mode as you are fullscreen, fullscreen will give better performance.

[Boomer]

fullscreen borderless or just full screen, I don't see any performance differences, but then ARK usually doesn't use much more than 10-20% cpu so there is plenty of wiggle room

[Deadman]

Fullscreen is best for performance. But for Ark specifically you might not notice much of a difference just because of how badly optimized the game is.

[[LZ]Icy]

ark loves amd xD however there is still a known random vid driver crash bug in ark (so either wait till fix , or try newer/older driver) not everyone has this issue (i never had it not even on my weak 270x TOP 2gb)

[AeonicWeapon]

I've currently got a 2GB AMD Radeon R9 270. So it could just be isolated to my video card/its drivers not necessarily that my GPU is going out? Thats good to hear. Will have to try and older driver. Hopefully that'll work but will be interesting to find a driver old enough as this has been an issue for a few months now.

[margalus]

It's exactly the same either way on my systems. So I play windowed full screen so I can drag the mouse off to my other monitors easily.