Fullscreen mode is slower than windowed?

SDL Development
1

I’m using SDL-1.1.8 in Windows 2000.

When using fullscreen mode, it is slower than windowed mode.

example :slight_smile:
fullscreen mode : 36.78 FPS
windowed mode : 87.61 FPS

Why fullscreen mode is slower than windowed?

I wrote like this :

SDL_SetVideoMode( 640, 480, 16, SDL_OPENGL | SDL_FULLSCREEN);

and My VGA Card is :
Vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer : GeForce2 GTS/AGP/3DNOW!
Version : 1.2.1

P.S. good day!!

2

It may be my graphics card problem.

I tested it on another 3d card nVidia Riva TNT 2 Ultra.

On TNT2, Fullscreen played as fast as windowed mode.> ----- Original Message -----

From: @Jiho_Choi (Jiho Choi)
To:
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 4:23 AM
Subject: [SDL] Fullscreen mode is slower than windowed?

I’m using SDL-1.1.8 in Windows 2000.

When using fullscreen mode, it is slower than windowed mode.

example :slight_smile:
fullscreen mode : 36.78 FPS
windowed mode : 87.61 FPS

Why fullscreen mode is slower than windowed?

I wrote like this :

SDL_SetVideoMode( 640, 480, 16, SDL_OPENGL | SDL_FULLSCREEN);

and My VGA Card is :
Vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer : GeForce2 GTS/AGP/3DNOW!
Version : 1.2.1

P.S. good day!!

3

It may also be that the drivers don’t support the same set of hardware
acceleration features…–

Olivier A. Dagenais - Software Architect and Developer

“???” wrote in message
news:000901c0914b$5d142570$16c8c8c8 at ziho…

It may be my graphics card problem.

I tested it on another 3d card nVidia Riva TNT 2 Ultra.

On TNT2, Fullscreen played as fast as windowed mode.

----- Original Message -----
From: “Jiho Choi”
To:
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 4:23 AM
Subject: [SDL] Fullscreen mode is slower than windowed?

I’m using SDL-1.1.8 in Windows 2000.

When using fullscreen mode, it is slower than windowed mode.

example :slight_smile:
fullscreen mode : 36.78 FPS
windowed mode : 87.61 FPS

Why fullscreen mode is slower than windowed?

I wrote like this :

SDL_SetVideoMode( 640, 480, 16, SDL_OPENGL | SDL_FULLSCREEN);

and My VGA Card is :
Vendor : NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer : GeForce2 GTS/AGP/3DNOW!
Version : 1.2.1

P.S. good day!!

4

Why fullscreen mode is slower than windowed?

It isn’t slower. In fullscreen mode the flip is synced to the vertical
refresh. In windowed mode it isn’t. So your fullscreen version spends more
time waiting for the next flip…> -----Original Message-----

From: Jiho Choi [mailto:zho at popsmail.com]

5

It isn’t slower. In fullscreen mode the flip is synced to the vertical
refresh. In windowed mode it isn’t. So your fullscreen version spends more
time waiting for the next flip…

That’s not true by default in OpenGL. It’s a preference setting,
see Daniels previous post on the topic.

See ya!
-Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer, Loki Entertainment Software

6

I changed my OpenGL setting.

vertical sync : on -> off

and then, the fullscreen performance is as good as windowed. (^^;)

I think that it is not a SDL problem. (just OpenGL driver problem !!..)

Thanks for replying!! (^____^)

“Sam Lantinga” wrote in message
news:E14Qm6I-0005Xw-00 at roboto.devolution.com…

It isn’t slower. In fullscreen mode the flip is synced to the vertical
refresh. In windowed mode it isn’t. So your fullscreen version spends
more> > time waiting for the next flip…

That’s not true by default in OpenGL. It’s a preference setting,
see Daniels previous post on the topic.

See ya!
-Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer, Loki Entertainment Software

7

Not quite, actually. To get optimum performance and avoid tearing, you need
to use more than two display buffers, and SDL doesn’t support that (yet).

Just to make things more complicated, some targets seem incapable of
implementing triple buffering in any useful way… (You need hardware page
flipping, or at least a timer or retrace driven “flip handler” for that to be
of much use. I’m thinking about how to hack that into the Utah-GLX MGA
driver, but I’m not even sure it’s at all possible without severely degrading
rendering performance.)

However, an SDL_TRIPLEBUFFER flag could just try double buffering if all else
fails and not case much trouble for the application, I think.

//David

.- M A I A -------------------------------------------------.
| Multimedia Application Integration Architecture |
| A Free/Open Source Plugin API for Professional Multimedia |
----------------------> http://www.linuxaudiodev.com/maia -' .- David Olofson -------------------------------------------. | Audio Hacker - Open Source Advocate - Singer - Songwriter |--------------------------------------> david at linuxdj.com -'On Thursday 08 February 2001 13:37, Jiho Choi wrote:

I changed my OpenGL setting.

vertical sync : on -> off

and then, the fullscreen performance is as good as windowed. (^^;)

I think that it is not a SDL problem. (just OpenGL driver problem !!..)

Thanks for replying!! (^____^)