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Term

Exclusive fullscreen vs borderless

Also searched as: exclusive fullscreen · borderless · borderless windowed · fullscreen optimizations · windowed fullscreen

What it means

Two ways a game can own your screen. Exclusive fullscreen hands the whole display to the game; borderless runs it in a maximized window that Windows still composites.

More detail

Exclusive can give slightly lower latency and lets some VRR and color features kick in cleanly; borderless makes alt-tabbing and overlays seamless. Modern Windows narrows the gap with a feature it applies automatically, which you can turn off per game to test. Which feels better is genuinely per-setup — measure it rather than trusting a blanket rule.

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