No-lag fullscreen in Windows 8 - Suggestions?
Posted: 05 May 2013, 09:31
Hi there,
so on Windows 8 you can forget almost every old DirectX game if you want to run it in fullscreen. I stumbled the technical details up, to sum it up the new DWM of Windows 8 can't be turned off which could've helped, old games are emulated by whatever and eventually end up being drawn by the CPU at some stage when it comes to displaying the rendered stuff.
This causes heavy lag (1 FPS per Second) in GTA2 if you want to run it in fullscreen! In windowed mode everything is ok and in the same speed as in Windows 7 or earlier.
The same behavior is seen in other old games like Worms and some unknown ones.
A fix to set some Direct_Draw_ (lol) compatibility flags in the registry does not help here as it does in old Direct_Draw_ games (yeah, not D3D, so no wonder though).
The best thing here would be to have a fake fullscreen which just removes the window border and positions and resizes the window of GTA so that it fills the whole screen.
Did anyone do this yet? At the moment I always set my taskbar to auto-hide and then dock the GTA2 window at the top border which gives a mostly fullscreen result:

Another nasty thing is that whenever the GTA2 window gets focus back, it restores itself from the maximized state to normal.
so on Windows 8 you can forget almost every old DirectX game if you want to run it in fullscreen. I stumbled the technical details up, to sum it up the new DWM of Windows 8 can't be turned off which could've helped, old games are emulated by whatever and eventually end up being drawn by the CPU at some stage when it comes to displaying the rendered stuff.
This causes heavy lag (1 FPS per Second) in GTA2 if you want to run it in fullscreen! In windowed mode everything is ok and in the same speed as in Windows 7 or earlier.
The same behavior is seen in other old games like Worms and some unknown ones.
A fix to set some Direct_Draw_ (lol) compatibility flags in the registry does not help here as it does in old Direct_Draw_ games (yeah, not D3D, so no wonder though).
The best thing here would be to have a fake fullscreen which just removes the window border and positions and resizes the window of GTA so that it fills the whole screen.
Did anyone do this yet? At the moment I always set my taskbar to auto-hide and then dock the GTA2 window at the top border which gives a mostly fullscreen result:

Another nasty thing is that whenever the GTA2 window gets focus back, it restores itself from the maximized state to normal.