Full Screen Programs in Windows
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Why is it that when switching back from a full screen program (like a game,) all of the other (non-full screen) application windows are screwed up? They will switch monitors, some of them will be maximized when before, they weren't. And most of them will be resized and moved seemingly randomly. :mad:
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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:-) It is the same game as always. When two programs use the same resources, in this case the video memory and the GPU, there must be some kind of mutual exclusion mechanism. otherwise you will have race conditions or deadlocks. DirectX is quite radical. The Desktop Manager looses all rights to access to the screen and has to wait until it gets the context back. Then it's time to reinitialize and redraw everything. More than one monitor does not make it easier. A lot of games suffer from that problem as well. It took Bethesda until Skyrim to get that right without occasional glitches or deadlocks.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
Lame answer, but when the program gains the context, it needs to save off the original context so that it can restore the original context when it loses context.
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Lame answer, but when the program gains the context, it needs to save off the original context so that it can restore the original context when it loses context.
It does not work that way. You don't get any chance to save anything. You are informed that you just lost the context and from then on all graphics related calls will fail. by the way, how do you save a graphics processor? Don't call me lame. I'm just the messenger. Talk about it with Mickeysoft.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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It does not work that way. You don't get any chance to save anything. You are informed that you just lost the context and from then on all graphics related calls will fail. by the way, how do you save a graphics processor? Don't call me lame. I'm just the messenger. Talk about it with Mickeysoft.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
Accepted. My answer was based on screen context memory, which is why it was lame. Well answered!
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In addition to what already was told about different monitors and zooms or so. Even with only one monitor there are sometimes weird things happen. That's because full Screen does not necessarily mean full resolution. I.e. some games are full screen but in older resolutions like 800x600 or 1024x768. If you usually use 1920x1680 then the graphic card / monitor manager has to switch up and down depending on what is actively focused. If you have an app that is not maximized but is using a bigger area than the full screen game resolution... it reacts weirder as it would have been maximized from the beginning.
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
This. I'm late to this thread, but for some reason my RSS reader marked it as unread, and I didn't remember going through it. What you've described above matches my experience as well. If my desktop is running at 1920x1080, but a game switches fullscreen but at 1280x720 (for example), then the windows that were already opened on the desktop, and the icons on the desktop themselves, get resized/moved around to fit 1280x720 when the game takes over (if they don't fit the 1280x720 area starting from the top-left corner), and while the desktop *resolution* is restored back when exiting the game, the icons/windows don't follow. Everybody passes the blame around - it's not an app's responsibility to restore the desktop layout when it exits, and once items have been moved/resized to fit the lower resolution, those new sizes/positions get committed, and no window manager that I know of (including anything on Linux) thinks it's its job to undo that. By now it's been years I've played nothing but *one* game, which happens to run at the same resolution as my desktop (native 4K), and I haven't encountered that problem since. I have zero doubt that's the key.
