Monday, August 23, 2010

Play Any Game In Borderless Windowed Fullscreen (aka Maximized Window)

World of Warcraft and StarCraft II fullscreen side by side, as God intended.
Update 20 March 2012: please refer to this page on PCGamingWiki for further updates on borderless fullscreen windowed mode for any game.

Games like StarCraft II and World of Warcraft provide the option to run their game in "Windowed Fullscreen" (aka Maximized Window). Also modern Valve Source games such as Left 4 Dead, Alien Swarm and Half-Life 2 natively support this mode, calling it "Windowed (No Border)". This is basically a normal windowed game where the window has been stretched to fit the screen in such a way that it looks maximized (by hiding borders of the window and the title bar).

This has several advantages to running a game in traditional fullscreen mode:

1) Ability to alt-tab quickly at any moment, even during loading screens.
2) Does not disturb multi-monitor set ups during loading.
3) Generally more stable experience.