So I was thinking about this the other day and a few of my friends say they prefer windowed to fullscreen for a number of reasons, i.e multitasking, brighter, and better for the game. I'm actually wondering what The Sims 3 was actually designed to be played in ? Or does it really not matter? what do you guys prefer to play in? I usually play in fullscreen myself, people have said their fullscreen is very dark but I have not really found that XD

Fullscreen, of course. All games are designed to be played in fullscreen and in my case, it looks decidedly better due to some rendering issues. I find the game to be too bright when played in windowed mode because my shaders scale differently in this mode and give the entire window a distinctly different look.

I prefer windowed
Mostly because I like being able to go between my game and any online stuff I’m doing like being on the forums, tumblr, editing pics, etc.

Right now I'm trying windowed yeah it is brighter for me to. I actually didn't realize all games are designed to be played in fullscreen haha shows i know very little about gaming XD

Well some modern games are prioritizing borderless windows over exclusive fullscreen (i.e. the fullscreen we all know and love). Games in fullscreen always have better performance than games in window mode (borderless or not). It makes total sense if you think about it, since your GPU still is rendering Windows and other programs you may be running at the same time vs. fullscreen in which the CPU is solely focused on rendering the game. Games in (borderless) window mode are also believed to cause input lag, though I haven't tested it myself.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense

I feel like we're not considering the potential of both. Game fullscreen on the one monitor, Chrome on the other. Should be possible if you can set up a borderless fullscreen. I do run my game at 1440p on a 1080p monitor so I'm not sure if that would be problematic or not.

Full-screen is more immersive, windowed allows you to do other things more easily without having to Alt-tab or any of that nonsense.

Of course everything has its drawbacks and benefits.

Ts3 is such a resource hog that I wouldnt even consider that. Doing it with Skyrim, Soul Calibur, and other high end games, I can get away with it. But Ts3? Nope.
Instead, Ts3 on the desktop, Chrome on the laptop.

The real resource hog here is Chrome. I can't believe 5 tabs and some extensions use 6 GB of RAM. A single YouTube tab uses well over 600 MB. This is insanity, Google. Fix it!

Fullscreen always. When I Sim I Sim and when I want to do other things I do not play Sims.

Windowed. I never play any Sims game in fullscreen. Mainly because they don't use joypad support.



I've 5 tab opens and it's using only 1GB. Chrome is not known for having good performance on computers with limited RAM. The average computer now has 16GB. Using 1 and plus 2 for the OS is still leaving 13 for games. It's hardly a problem that google should fix.

Definitely fullscreen, always. I never ever play any game in windowed screen.

Hold on! I thought you had to have it windowed if you wanted to see Reshade effects on screenshots.

I have been playing windowed and it is really easy to get distracted.

Windowed so I can keep an eye on the game's RAM usage as often as I need or wish to. Not because I don't have enough RAM to work with, but because I'm always pushing what my games use with my overpopulated worlds in my long-running ongoing game. I just had my first Error 12 in what feels like ages the other day because I was so absorbed in what I was doing that I forgot to check often enough. It was like saying hello to an old friend who decided to stop by for the first time in years (sort of).

I wouldn't say that the average computer today has 16 GB. While not uncommon, that still seems ahead of the curve. And yes, both Google Chrome and the latest versions of Firefox with their multiple independent threading and predictive technology reserving RAM in advance of needing it will (not for everyone) run wild given a chance and that should be stopped.

I use windowed because I can do things on the side, like changing what playlist of videos I'm listening to while playing. I also used windowed when I wanted to try to record my gameplay, but I'll have to fiddle with that because I ended up getting a lot of lagged recording.

No, the opposite! It's meant to be run in fullscreen and in my experience, the game looks decidedly worse in windowed mode. I'm not sure why but my theory is that many of the values Reshade uses for its settings are in some way tied to screen resolution. I have things like fake HDR, active contrast and screen space ambient lighting enabled and they all seem to require a particular amount of window resolution to function as intended.

Windowed mode so I can multitask. When I play games I have a tendency to randomly fall asleep even while wide awake. This way I can multi task without having to worry to much about clunking out. I don't trust my sims on their own for more then 3 minutes. I've clunked out for five minutes once and I swear everything was on fire all the needs where down, and the baby wouldn't shut up. And you know how everything is baby focused so no putting out the fire when sims are stuck between baby-OMG fire-baby-OMG FIRE!

I play in borderless window mode with a mod. I like how it doesn't have the actual window, but i can still alt-tab and go internet surfing or photoshop whenever I want. I usually edit my pics as I take them so full screen would be annoying for me. I feel like my game looks better this way too, but I might just be delusional

Thats funny you mention that as its the same with me when i use sweet fx in windowed it looks odd, but using sweet fx with fullscreen looks fine. Its specifically the HDR that don't work properly for me in windowed mode

Well god damn. Thanks for letting me know. I could have sworn that I read somewhere that windowed boardless gaming was way to go with Reshade. I'm off to trace this program that I set over a year ago and forgot about.

Ah, now I remember why I got it, using screen capture programs makes the screenshot really dark.

Only if you're using the wrong screen capture program. All I know is that FRAPS works and OBS and the in-game capture tool don't. Actually, speaking of that, I updated to Reshade 3.1.something recently and it's let me reorganize the rendering priority. I believe the shaders now render before the final game composite frame rather than after, so maybe the game capture tool can see the shaders now. I really haven't thought to try.

Windowed when I'm trying to figure out NRAAS SP, which is like, always. Sims in one window, NRAAS website in the other. also, if a mod is glitching, windowed because it's easier to close the window when the game goes into a coma.

Not really. The same steps and time is required to kill a windowed program compared to a fullscreen. You still have to press ctrl+alt+del and bring up task manager, find the exe and kill process. The redesigned task switcher menu and task menu introduced in post Win 7 systems make it quite easy to kill a frozen fullscreen process.

If this was still the XP days I'd otherwise agree. In that OS it was quite often that if a fullscreen process froze you'd have to reboot the entire system as the frozen process would take priority over XP's GUI commands blocking the user from seeing the task manager window.