Fullscreen lets you change your brightness. Also windowed gives me weird input lag for some reason.

Flicking out of my window is pretty triggering, outside of that fullscreen windowed is top tier

cant u just change ur screen brightness manually LOL

fullscreen puts all processing power towards the program but if you're windowed it will also have to draw your desktop and programs shown below, so from a technical perspective fullscreen is superior. However Source has a very wonky alt+tab so people like to windowed if they tab a lot. probably other differences too but those are the ones I know.

I use windowed when I play jumps or mge, it provides stability with alt-tabbing. But I always switch to fullscreen if I'm about to play something more or less serious. Can't tell if this is fullscreen, I'm usually playing in 1024x768 stretched, and fullscreen is the only way to cover the entire monitor, but I'm getting a perfect performance with it, while windowed gives a terrible input lag from time to time when I play in native resolution.

LOL just put a lamp in front of your monitor?????

if that doesn't make it brighter u can use yellow highlighter pens

If your computer has a good CPU you shouldn't feel too much of a performance drop from using windowed, although fullscreen is technically superior. Alt-tabbing is very important to me so I use windowed, my computer always lags badly when trying to alt-tab out of fullscreen.

edit - tried fullscreen again and it alt-tabs perfectly, not sure what changed. but depends on your computer I suppose

x

Windowed is typically about ~5% fps drop, input lag feel may vary a bit on PC setup, for example mine feels virtually the same regardless if I use borderless windowed or fullscreen other than the slightly lower FPS for some people it might be pretty bad.

Alt+Tabbing out of a Borderless windowed might be a bit weird in multi-monitor setups. In my case the game remains in the back ground and it makes it an issue to where I can't see my desktop on my primary monitor until I minimize the window (Windows Key+Down Arrow)

My recommendation, try borderless windowed if the input lag/lower FPS is not noticeable/doesn't bother you and you enjoy fast alt+tabs or have a multi-monitor setup I'd use borderless window.

Some helpful notes if you go borderless windowed.

-If you enjoy a non-native resolution for TF2 set your desktop to that resolution as well so the borderless window is full screen. Your video card control panel should have options for centered timings and if you want use stretched etc etc. SIDE NOTE: make sure your desktop is set to the same refresh rate as what you want to play

-some key commands (Windows Key+Down Arrow to minimize selected window) (windows key + m minimizes all windows) (shift + windows key + m Undo minimize all) (windows key + D Minimizes all open windows and displays the desktop)

-your only choice for changing brightness/gamma in TF2 is your monitor OSD or video card settings. Which is kinda lame :/

fullscreen because it has les input lag for me and I can play on my 5:4 resolution without any trouble

fullscreen - takes longer to alt-tab, generally more fps, reduction of input lag

borderless - easy alt-tabbing, might interfere with windows taskbar, easier to play on custom resolutions, changing brightness only using win/driver/monitor (global), for me it causes stuttering, heard of problems with mumble overlay

alt-tabbing in fullscreen isn't even that bad if you don't keep -dxlevel in your launch options, apart from when it gets stuck during loading

to me playing in windowed feels worse than dx9

i just play windowed with a flashlight in my left hand ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

im pretty sure Aero in Windows has VSync enabled unless you went out of your way to disable it, thats probably the reason for the input lag

My knockoff korean monitor doesn't have an OSD so that's not an option.