adamsetzler
1 discussion post
Okay, maybe this is too new a feature, but I play games on a secondary monitor. These games run in full screen mode, so when I click on my primary monitor's desktop, the full screen app on the secondary monitor is minimized to reveal the desktop of the secondary monitor.
It would be nice to have a "keep this full screen app on top" feature. I personally know that you would gain the business of most MMORPG players out there.
Unfortunately this is a function of Windows, and it has to do this. From my limited understanding of how 3D cards work, they can't be shared. So when your game loses focus it breaks it's connection with the video card's 3D processing, then has to rebuild that (texture cache... etc) when it regains focus. There wouldn't be anything I can do to prevent the game from minimizing itself. Sorry this is so poorly explained, but I am really not an expert on game programming, I've only dabbled.
Very true Benway, they are in a class of their own when compared to "normal" Windows applications.
This is how I understand it...feel free to correct me if I am way out in left field....
Part of the problem lies in the way the OS itself is making use of the video card and its capabilities - for example, when I tried XP x86-64 with my rig, just to get a good feel for how fast W7 really is, I found that in order to enable or disable SLI I have to reboot. WT...? You have to be kidding me. Reboot every time I want to use SLI?
The only good thing to come out of this was that I created a separate hardware profile for SLI and non SLI, and also created separate user profiles, so that in SLI I could have a minimalist system running to give my games full attention.
That changed in Vista, since I don't have the option for hardware profiles - but then again, I don't have to reboot for SLI enabling / disabling either, so the trade off is somewhat irksome and somewhat of a relief.
Now with W7, I get XP speeds and Vista's capabilities - which means that inside of 10 seconds I can go from being in a non-SLI'd dual monitor environment to and SLI minimalistic environment and am ready to fire yup my game of choice.
The other part of the problems is that, by default, although your drivers can support things like OpenGL and DirectX natively in the OS the OS itself does not make use of those for every day use - whereas the game most than likely does. Therein lies the issue - having the GA to 'partially' accelerate one part of a dual window (read:monitor) system gets tedious and will put a strain on the OS and CPU (ironically).
The joys of dealing with the M$ GUI environment....
I am I.
If the Canadian tax laws are kind, you can *easily* write it off as a business expense on your taxes....
I am using the machine I built last year to add to my return this year as a part of my business (computer tech guy) and hopefully I'll make enough between that and actual income to expand the machine by another $2000 (I want a Core i7 965 EE with 12 GB of RAM)
I am I.
