
Games running in a window won’t have exclusive access to your graphics hardware, so they won’t perform quite as well as they would in full-screen mode.

If you Alt+Tab out of it, you can hover over the game’s taskbar icon or press Alt+Tab again. You can see this in action when you have a game running in full-screen, exclusive mode. For a variety of reasons - especially problems with the way some games are coded - the game may encounter a problem while doing this.

When you switch back to the game, the game has to restore itself and take control away from Windows. It has to minimize the game and start rendering the desktop again. Windows doesn’t just have to switch from one window to another when you press Alt+Tab. This means you can squeeze the most gaming performance out of your graphics hardware by running the game in full-screen mode, and that’s why games run in full-screen mode by default. When a game runs in full-screen mode, it can gain exclusive access to your graphics hardware - this is known as running in “Exclusive Mode.” Windows won’t render your desktop in the background, which saves on hardware resources. The real question here is why games run in this full-screen mode in the first place, if the full-screen mode itself is a problem.

But full-screen mode seems to be different - full-screen games can’t be Alt+Tabbed out of as easily. This isn’t a problem when you play a game in windowed mode, where you can Alt+Tab easily. It’s not just pressing Alt+Tab that’s a problem - pressing the Windows key may do the same thing, as it takes you out of the game and back to the Windows desktop. Why is Alt+Tabbing Out of a Full-Screen Game So Problematic? Even when Alt+Tab works properly, it may take several seconds to move back and forth - something which can be frustrating if you want to quickly switch between applications. If you’ve played games on Windows, this is probably familiar. The Alt+Tab process may be extremely slow, the game may crash or freeze, or you may see graphical corruption. You’re playing a game and you Alt+Tab to use another program, but there’s a problem.
