My lifelong problems about DWM/Monitors a bunch of problems and years of research !

[kizx]

OP when you talk about running smooth i bet you are not even running monitor scaling,and if you want you can test it in game,before i use cru,when i go in game and click on monitor there is bunch of options,but there window when i see my resolution, so for example mine res is 640x480,when i click on the monitor it says 1920x1080 240hz,but when i change resolution and change timings in cru,when i go in game the monitor says 640x480 240hz, so now its monitor scaling + new timings,i can verify this with my life its night and day difference,i can upload screenshot to see it.I never i try to run a game without dwm,there is a post here in this forum,a guy shows a script how to run games without dwm,but it breaks taskbar, explorer i think and etc,and the link for github its not working,but also like you he was saying that is night and day diffrence to play games without dwm,but i never saw someone making it/showing it or on a video,or maybe showing benchmakrs.

I am sorry i do not understand what you're saying, my resolution is 2560x1440p 240hz set in windows and in all my games i just let it at native too.

without reading my huge post above the biggest tldr i can give trying to explain my lifelong situation is that it goes like this : boot PC , move the mouse on desktop, feeling is ordinary nothing special, restart Windows explorer in task manager + play a video for couple seconds , move the mouse again on desktop = mouse is now super smooth 240hz amazing, open game i want to play and game will also feel good. Repeat if needed if i feel like refresh rate feels off again.

The people above mentionned things like independant flip, dwm stuff so im trying to get knowledge for that in case this is very related so if i can pinpoint what is going on i can maybe fix it instead of doing my temp fix everytime.

my new theory after reading all of this is that my doing my steps "prime" my dwm in awake state so windows any desktop animation like my mouse at 240 frames so now it feels and i can see the true 240hz. and before i did those steps even if i was at 240hz, windows did not output 240 frames. by fixing that issue in the desktop even before opening my game im making sure that my game will work properly.

my other new explaining to this situation is that im "baiting" dwm to be busy elsewhere( with the video /netflix or whatever ) so then my mouse/game since dwm is busy elsewhere is willing to be and stay in independant flip easier which feel more like a 1:1 240hz.

[naporitan]

MPOs are required for overlays to work with g-sync, because independent flip presentation (which bypasses DWM) is required for g-sync.

thank you sincerely for this information! I didn't even know that disabling this feature would ruin the whole gaming experience in a game like cs2! I couldn't figure out why the game was acting weird for a long time, but by enabling this feature everything worked very well, now I can spray at enemies.
I always followed the advice of the customizers and disabled this gsync feature and couldn't understand why I was getting a bad experience in the game....
I have my system completely clean with no schizo tweaks.

It would be really great if you could write a detailed guide to customizing the system for competitive gaming.

[ManWhoSoldTheWorld]

It would be really great if you could write a detailed guide to customizing the system for competitive gaming.

https://blurbusters.com/gsync/gsync101- ... -settings/ + MPO

[JimCarry]

It would be really great if you could write a detailed guide to customizing the system for competitive gaming.

https://blurbusters.com/gsync/gsync101- ... -settings/ + MPO

???????????????????????????????????????????????? can explain this post?

[kizx]

Right now im trying to get data for what im feeling. Im trying WPR/WPA and presentmon to see what is going on behind the scene but it just makes no sense unless im reading the date wrong or if even those tool cant see correctly.

So when i start PC, or just been in idle for a long time , mouse feel ordinary ( i move it and see with my eyes this is not 240 hz animation because the motion blur is less smooth ) I go and restart file explorer and then i play netflix, twitch , youtube , go watch someone on a discord screenshare anything animated or that can keep my DWM busy enough. then i stop netflix or whatever else. my mouse becomes super smooth looking on my desktop so i know my monitor works properly and that windows gives me 240 fps at 240hz instead of whatever frames at 240hz.

Then i decided that once its smooth im gonna learn how to use one of these tools and just see for myself if windows is giving me 240 fps so then i will have proof and later on i could do the same without fixing it to have evidence of my claims you know instead of just guessing this is how windows works..

But then the issue is that those tools shows me mostly super low fps values and wont always be at 240 fps but it feels amazing with my fix so either im not reading the data right or i just dont understand ( thats for WPA )

now for presentmon it always give me like 20-30 fps in desktop and when i go in my games with gsync it works at 240 fps... ( but it will feel like it only if i did my restart manager +netflix trick ) otherwise it wont feel super smooth that is the weird part lol.

here is the screenshot of my WPA thing im not even sure what im looking at i assume the vertical line that goes to 240 + is my frame and the below time but im not sure if this is ms time or recording time because i only recorded 20 seconds and it goes to 30 maybe some expert here can tell me

[kizx]

Hey all after many years of research and way more since yesterday I think with the help of chat gpt to understand things quickly and alot of research I finally understand what alot of people dont which is why the nature of how DWM works and stuff is so obscured and that most people wont even notice it. Im also pretty sure alot of problem in the genre of " yesterday gaming felt amazing " but today not and i changed nothing could be the result of this exact DWM stuff.

Im going and try to explain what I understood, honestly its not complicated but at the same time it kinda is that im typing that to also make sure i remember it in case i forget.

So you know how people say Fullscreen is better than Bordeless but then goes with benchmarks and we have almost no difference ? well its not about the difference that we can see with data but more the "feel" of it that can be night and day.

With Fullscreen = you will be in a different flip and Windows will ignore DWM completely so it stops issues right away ( I would still refresh file explorer from time to time and clean pagefiles for dwm from time to time and restart PC ) if things get dirty sometimes Windows is cringe and its still lagging...

With bordeless = this is so complicated that im not even done understanding everything but you either have legacy flip so everything goes through DWM and you have higher latency, if DWM is in any power saving state because you did not reset file explorer, you been idle for a while or your pc is just not doing enough task your game will feel even worst even if youre at good fps. the higher the frames/ refresh rate the better it will feel but still not the real " whatever refresh you have " OR you have another flip which is composite flip and it's almost like in the good fullscreen exclusive flip i mentioned above but part of it still goes into DWM and this is when things can become annoying...

let say you have composite flip on one of your games. 240 fps gsync is working perfectly at 240hz but you never restarted file explorer after idle, you did not watch any videos e.g netflix, nothing is hardware accelarated your windows was legit sleeping what is happening is that

my analogy: you have 2 guys, one is composite flip and one is DWM both with ankles chains, composite flip wants to run while DWM is walking/sleeping what end up happening is that DWM will slow composite flip so the 1:1 monitor 240hz feeling with low latency and everything is bother smooth wont be there. While if you do what i mentioned that works which is restart file explorer, and im using netflix but alot works there, you are waking up DWM in a good state I havent fully understood WPA tool yet to have proof of that but maybe DWM is pushing more frames or your exact refresh rate which is the dream so then what end up happening is that composite flip wants to run and DWM is running with it.

What could also be happening is that DWM is so busy with whatever else you threw at it that even in bordeless fullscreen it leaves your game alone so composite flip become independant flip like it would in fullscreen and the result is that it feels perfect.

Which all of this could explain why sometimes people feel like gaming is amazing and sometimes off, DWM sometimes is lazy because of the nature of Windows and sometimes things you are doing before you open your game or meanwhile you game primed the DWM in a good state.

Honestly all of this took me a while to catch on because a bad state and a good state are similar the higher your refreshrate is but if you ever experience a true 1:1 low latency perfect refreshrate where all the stars are align you have trouble to go back and will instantly notice it and the nature of that perfection is so fragile that noticing it is more like a curse than a blessing.

So where do we go from there well for me i will keep trying to understand with tools the nature of how what every tricks im doing prime DWM in a good state to see if i could issolate that good state better and understand better how all of this works. Try to figure out if everything I said above is explained in better way and terms so i can search better about it and maybe people figured all of this out long time ago and there is better ways to reach perfection. I will until then keep doing what im doing to reach perfection because i prefer playing in bordeless to alt tab and the next project of min maxing my performance for me is trying to set the perfect fan curve because apparently if your fanspeed is too volatile it can lead to performance loss because things will clock differently but that is another subjet.

thank you if people ever read this and add things to help me im checking everyday

[hazzahodgson]

composed flip vs hardware: independant flip, notice the display latency. massive difference - https://imgur.com/a/HxePpJh

[kizx]

composed flip vs hardware: independant flip, notice the display latency. massive difference - https://imgur.com/a/HxePpJh

yes but some games dont have independant. I found a couple things that seem to have helped.

1) I switched the ownership of the dvr & gamebar in the registry and disabled it , no longer running in task manager during my games

2) I always try to keep my DWM active with one of the things i mentioned already in this post ( seems to not have to do this if the game is very demanding )

3) even if im already using 100% scaling by default in windows i made a custom scaling value of 100% and it appears to be better i dont know why microsoft thing i guess. ( it looks the same but the mouse feels better )