Blur Busters Forums

Hello there,

Bit the bullet and upgraded using the Windows Insiders slow ring. Everything seems to work fine, but even after clean re-installing my Nvidia Drivers (latest ones, 391.35), I cannot get Borderless G-Sync to work. It works fine in fullscreen mode. (And yes, the option is enabled in Nvidia Control Panel - I've done this dance before! )

Anyone else experiencing this?

Win10, GTX1070 ti, 16 Gb RAM

If you haven't already, you can attempt to disable Windows game bar and/or "fullscreen optimizations" for the game's exe, which will, in turn, disable Window 10's exclusive fullscreen/borderless-windowed hybrid mode. If that doesn't work, it's down to that specific OS update's interaction with the driver, and you'll have to wait until it's fixed by one or both sides (Microsoft/Nvidia).

Some have also reported the G-SYNC borderless/windowed mode isn't working properly (hitching) on the latest consumer version of Windows 10 (1709).

Since the G-SYNC borderless/windowed mode relies on the OS's DWM to function, this is pretty much an unavoidable issue for problem driver/OS updates.

jorimt wrote:If you haven't already, you can attempt to disable Windows game bar and/or "fullscreen optimizations" for the game's exe, which will, in turn, disable Window 10's exclusive fullscreen/borderless-windowed hybrid mode. If that doesn't work, it's down to that specific OS update's interaction with the driver, and you'll have to wait until it's fixed by one or both sides (Microsoft/Nvidia).

Some have also reported the G-SYNC borderless/windowed mode isn't working properly (hitching) on the latest consumer version of Windows 10 (1709).

Since the G-SYNC borderless/windowed mode relies on the OS's DWM to function, this is pretty much an unavoidable issue for problem driver/OS updates.

I tried disabling "fullscreen optimizations", which didn't make a difference.
I did notice however, that after DDU'ing and installing an older (or the newest, didn't matter) driver, gsync windowed worked for as long as I did not reboot my computer after the driver install. After rebooting, it was broken again.

This led me to believe that something goes wrong in the startup, whilst initializing DWM. I disabled fast startup, but that didn't help. What does (temporarily) remedy the situation though, is manually killing dwm.exe. It restarts, and every game I start then has working windowed g-sync.

I wonder if ToastyX's restart64.exe works? (It comes with CRU)

Chief Blur Buster wrote:I wonder if ToastyX's restart64.exe works? (It comes with CRU)

I tested it, and indeed, it has the same end result. It probably does more than just killing dwm.exe, but whatever works.

I've compiled my findings and solutions in this Nvidia Geforce Forum post, for anyone who's in the same boat: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topi ... ess-gsync/

I think the fastest solution then is to just create a shortcut on the desktop that you double-click to kill dwm.exe. This is way faster than running restart64.exe which needs to reload the driver (and actually on my system pollutes the CRU monitor list with junk entries every time I run it, and also seems to reset some nvidia driver settings to defaults if I changed them and didn't reboot yet.)

To do this, go to C:\Windows\System32. There should be a "Taskkill.exe" file there. Right-click it, and select "Send To", then "Desktop (create shortcut)". The shortcut will appear on the desktop. You can rename it to anything you want (I use "Kill DWM".)

Now right click the shortcut, and append "/F /IM dwm.exe" to the command, so that it looks like this:
Now click the "Advanced" button, and enable the "Run as administrator" option.

You can now use the shortcut to kill dwm.exe quickly. You can even assign a keyboard key combination if you want (but that's probably overkill.)

Using restart64.exe does seem like a pretty nuclear option indeed, when only killing dwm.exe will suffice.

I already made a little batch script to do just that, but thanks anyway!