Exclusive fullscreen actually decreases performance with a texture pack?

DrHouse64

Hi everyone !

Since it's supposed to have less input lag, better screen control and better performance, I always used exclusive fullscreen... until today.
When I got slowdowns from time to time using Smash Bros HD textures, I though "that's okey, must be hard drive access or something like that". But when slowdowns happens in netplay, that's not cool.

So I was trying to figure out if I could fix this, and when I tried to change random stuff on Graphics options, I realized that "borderless fullscreen" drastically improved performance. Smash was smooth, without any slowdowns.

Im I the only one which have this strange behavior?
I have to choose between HD textures or less input lag...

themanuel · 03-30-2016, 10:00 PM #2

When you switched to borderless fullscreen, did you also disable vsync? In my experience, vsync degrades performance quite a bit so instead I disable it and go into borderless fullscreen. This essentially takes advantage of Windows desktop composition so I get "free" vsync without the penalty.

Perhaps when you into borderless fullscreen dolphin does not attempt to do vsync and you are still getting this benefit, even if you have it enabled. To test that, stay in exclusive fullscreen but disable vsync to see if you get the same performance as with borderless. You won't want to play with screen tear but at least this will help sort out where the performance improvement is coming from.

DrHouse64 · 03-31-2016, 09:13 PM #3

Thanks, I will try that.
Also, AA is set to 2x SSAA. When I use exclusive fullscreen, 2x MSAA gives better speed results, but I still have slowdowns sometimes.
With borderless fullscreen, there's not slowdowns at all, even with 2x SSAA.

themanuel · 03-31-2016, 09:50 PM #4

I normally use 4x MSAA. When I've tried 4x SSAA, I get significant slowdowns. I haven't tried 2x SSAA but even with 4x SSAA I don't see much difference visually vs. 4x MSAA. I'll check it out, though. Thanks for the tip.

DrHouse64 · (This post was last modified: 04-03-2016, 01:54 AM by DrHouse64.)

Thanks for your concern, the main purpose of this thread is not to request help for better performance, but to alert devs that, on some scenarios, exclusive fullscreen don't act as expected. The fact that borderless fullscreen is faster than exclusive is not normal.

But I don't have enough/relevent information to open a request on the issue tracker, that's why I put it here.

DrHouse64 · 04-04-2016, 05:40 AM #6

Okey I got new info. It only happens with Direct3D (11). OpenGL exclusive fullscreen is fine.