Actually, no. This statement as you wrote it is wrong. Windowed mode in XP means you'll lose some perf. In Win7 and Vista, you're fine. XP's desktop is rendered in 2D mode, so when you run a 3D game in a window, the GFX card switches between 2D power mode and 3D power mode (and potentially ends up in 3D throttled mode) every frame. Vista and Win7 (Aero, basically) is 3D, so the graphics card remains in 3D mode all the time. If you maximize a window over top of empire sin Win7/Vista, you'll lose perf though, as you're then blitting that window over top of the 3D game.
Benchmarks on vista: In this benchmark, noborder windowed performance was at 75,6% compared to the fullscreen mode (or fullscreen is 32,3% faster then windowed/noborder). And no, there was no window "over" empires, empires filled te screen entirly, as if it was fullscreen. Or do you consider a speed descrease by around 1/4 as "fine"?
Initial benchmarks from when Vista first came out showed a 5% degredation, which is something I sneeze at. Some games might handle it better than others - but a minor degredation WILL happen as Windows has to deal with the whole idea of window focus when you run in windowed mode - IE, it still draws the desktop behind (hence why alt tabbing and opening the start menu are suddenly so fast.) It also depends on what programs you have running when you do this...as some will take more time to render. Finally, it even comes down to the OS. I've done it fine on Win7, but Win7 is generally more performant than Vista is. In summary (for those who want to say tl;dr): a 5-10% degredation can be seen, can be explained but it something to sneeze at in the end. My statement stands regarding XP vs Vista/Win7 - windowed gaming in XP was largely impossible for anything other than old games (certainly inadviseable for games that you'd run at full resolution.) So for those who want to avoid hitting the windows key: remap the key in the registry or buy a KB that has the ability o turn that key off. But in all honestly, how often do you hit the windows key? Do you find EMP so annoying that you start ,ashing your keys or something? Late edit: Also do some real world testing; I never EVER trust benchmarks for shit. They're not real world...they mean nothing. I can show you benchmarks that say I'm able to run Crysis on Ultra High @ 1920x1200 at 60 FPS. Real world perf is half of that, at 1920x1200. You people should have learned back in 2003 when nVidia and ATI were pulling benchmark optimizations in their drivers that benchmark numbers mean jack shit.
shhh, don't ruin the lolz for me. Of course I wanted to share the info to benefit all of those who uses slow computers. But knowing this community i kinda knew what reactions the thread will draw and accept with love all of their irrelevance.ove: for similar type of relevant comments check the forums for a guy called UtopiaGreen01. He was funny too.:p
For me Empires is running fine with XP in windowed mode at 1920x1200 (Full AA, Full Aniso). My system: Core2Duo E7200 (2,53 GHz) ATI HD4850 2 GB RAM
Or put one of those flip-up/flip-down button guards you always see on important buttons, in the movies...on it. Or maybe even rewire it so that it's a button taped to the side of the monitor (unless you're the Angry German Kid, it'll be hard to accidentally press it). Hard when you're mashing CTRL to get past enemies. And then it's a full minute or so until the game un-crashes (unless you ragequit because you pressed the Windows button).
