Quote Originally Posted by Lifepower View Post
In our experiments, there is absolutely no performance difference between exclusive full-screen and non-exclusive full-screen modes. In exclusive full-screen mode you get one less copy operation, but even on Intel integrated cards this is not a problem. Most video players go non-exclusive route anyway as to not mess up with your display. So, FPS is basically the same. Regarding "stable" picture and flickering - as long as you enable VSync, it is exactly the same also.
I disagre with this. As you probably know AERO desktop on Windows Vista and newer save contents of each whole window (window texture) from every non minimized program which is running. And theese are stored in Graphic Memory. This means that more programs you are running higher is GPU memory consumption. For instance on my laptop I curently have two active programs running (Winamp and Proces Explorer from Sysinternals). So curently my Graphic memory consumtion is 37,8 MB. Sure this seems almost nothing compared to 512 MB of Graphic memory but if I open more programs Graphics memory consumption will increase.
For instance opening notepad increases Graphic memory consumtion to 39,3 MB and just Maksimizing notepad raises Graphic memory consumtion to 41,8 BM. So you see how quickly can you fill up large protions of Graphic memory.
And since computer games often require large amounts of Graphic memory you will want to make as much of graphic memory available to them as posible. And you actually do this by running your game in FullScreen mode as this causes Windows to move all information for other programs from Graphic memory either to RAM or into Swap Page (usually RAM but can be later moved into swap if RAM consumption increases).
Another thing in AERO desktop is that window contents (window textures) are updated even if this window is behind some other window (not shown directly). Eventually this means that more windows are open more work is needed for graphic card to update contents of all of theese textures.
So yes running some game in Windowed mode could hurt it's performance if you have other programs open at the same time.
On Windows XP and older there was not much problem with this as only visible pats of each window were updatet at any time and there was only one texture used for whole screen (more when some applications were using overlay surfaces).
Sure it is posible to temporary disable AERO desktop on Windows Vista and newer but from my expirience this can cause even more problems as you need to make sure that swiching from your application will reenable AERO desktop and then switching back will disable it again. And in case of application crashing aero desktop might not get reenabled properly. So user reloging or system restart is needed.
Also tranzition between AERO desktop and clasic desktop can take even to few seconds of time depending on the number of open programs.
So using this approach isn't recomended. It is only included in newest Windows versions as backward compatibility for some older programs.

Quote Originally Posted by Lifepower View Post
In fact, exclusive full-screen mode can be considered now quite intrusive as it can be harmful to multiple desktop configuration and switching between exclusive and non-exclusive modes can produce flicker and mess up with your desktop.
Yes I agree that it can be a bit intrusive becouse if you use multiple monitors they will just go blank. This is due the fact I wrote above when in FullScreen mode windows only process window changes of the application which is ran in FullScreen mode.
As for flickering this is only present becouse Windows needs to move some data (window textures) from normal meory back to Graphic Memory so that it can be used for rendering other applications windows.
And on Windows XP or older there can be a bit more flickering since all windows needs to be redrawn compleetly and we all know how slow canvas redraws are. (GUI from Windows XP and older is canvas dependant while Windows Vista and newer using Aero desktop means that whole GUI is DirectX overlay surface based which alows much faster redraws).