Alt-tabbing

[Jeff7181]

Why is it that I can instantly alt-tab in and out of a game like World of Warcraft for example, but a game like Half Life 2 takes 30 seconds or so to restore the game to full screen?

 

[Glavinsolo]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Why is it that I can instantly alt-tab in and out of a game like World of Warcraft for example, but a game like Half Life 2 takes 30 seconds or so to restore the game to full screen?

you are probably running wow in minimized mode. Try setting this option in your other games

 

[Br0k3nman]

Not minimized mode, windowed mode; but he should be able to see that something is up with the viewing of wow.

 

[Jeff7181]

Definitely not running windowed.

 

[BladeVenom]

I think some games can be running in windowed mode, but still take up the whole screen.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: BladeVenom
I think some games can be running in windowed mode, but still take up the whole screen.

WoW has a Windowed mode and a Full Screen mode... I use the Full Screen mode.

 

[brainwrinkle]

Maybe WOW takes less video memory. I saw a huge improvement in alt-tabbing moving from a 128MB 6600GT to a 256MB 7600GT.

 

[archcommus]

It's just different for every game. I'm sure it has 100% to do with the game's own coding and how it handles such requests. Thus, it'll never be consistent.

 

[Alienwho]

Then you've even got the games that you can't alt-tab out of. You have to do something crazy like control-alt-escape, and sometimes that doesn't even work.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

Running wow full screen mode it takes me like 5 seconds to alt tab. Running it Windowed mode maximized (so it takes up the whole screen) alt tabbing is instant. I can also see wow in the backround which is handy when in BG queues and such... If you're running games in a different resolution than your desktop it'll slow down the alt tabbing a ton. If you have the exact same settings for the desktop as the game it should be almost instant.

 

[bjc112]

Originally posted by: brainwrinkle
Maybe WOW takes less video memory. I saw a huge improvement in alt-tabbing moving from a 128MB 6600GT to a 256MB 7600GT.

I have 2GB of ram and 512MB on my GPU, and I know exactly what he means, some games just ALT-TAB "faster" than others.