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raframlast Sunday at 2:48 PM3 repliesview on HN

Does macOS even have exclusive fullscreen anymore? I haven’t looked into it, but my impression is that it fakes it with borderless windowed even when the app explicitly asks for it.


Replies

peesemlast Sunday at 5:15 PM

it does still exist as far as i understand it. the resolution you select affects the size of the mouse cursor and then when switching away from the game you can see the rest of the system resizing back to normal

ezfelast Sunday at 5:11 PM

Regardless of how it worked, the game asking for it caused problems

peapickerlast Sunday at 11:14 PM

Yes. On Apple Silicon Macs (w/ macOS Sonoma or later), native fullscreen automatically triggers Game Mode. This feature slashes input lag by prioritizing CPU/GPU resources and doubling the Bluetooth polling rate to 240 Hz for wireless accessories. Gaming works very well in this mode, even with PC titles played thru crossover.

Conversely, using borderless windowed mode instead of native fullscreen on macOS adds rendering latency due to the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) compositor. The latter is 'doing it wrong' and has the lag people don't like.

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