I’m not sure about this one. I have enabled fullscreen and windowed fullscreen mode, which I assume should give a result close to the borderless fullscreen mode you can get in many games, right? But it seems to work only partially. I can get the mouse outside the screen bounds, but if I click anywhere outside or call up the start menu with the Windows key, RetroArch goes black for a few seconds, and does so once again if I click back inside RetroArch. This is not what I’d expect from this combination of settings. Is this normal behavior?
I think you need to enable “Automatic Mouse Grab” with windowed fullscreen, since only exclusive fullscreen grabs mouse by design. With a single display obviously mouse can’t go outside the fullscreen window in any case.
No sorry, that’s not what I meant, I should have better explained. I do not want the mouse to stay within the boundaries. I want to be able to have RetroArch in borderless fullscreen, that is a fullscreen experience but with the ability to focus any other application without having the screen go black like that. I’m not sure how some games manage to do it, it might not be a true fullscreen mode, I don’t know.
Ah. Maybe a different video driver behaves differently…?
I just tried with multiple monitors and with all drivers, and I don’t get any black flashing…
I tried with different drivers and you are correct. This is happening with glcore or vulkan, but not d3d10. The problem is I can’t really use anything but vulkan for some reason, other drivers have awful performance in shader compilation, plus I’m having a few stutters with direct3d…
You must have some kind of VRR display then, because this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that d3d drivers won’t do similar mode switch shenanigans on application unfocus or whatever is happening, regardless of RA settings.
Too bad I don’t have a VRR display so I can’t poke around to see what could be done about it.
And d3d11 is the most mature and usable of the d3d lot.
Yes you are correct, I have 144 Hz monitor with G-Sync. I’ll have to run some tests to see what happens if I disable G-Sync altogether in NVCP then. 
I actually upgraded to a G-Sync monitor specifically to eradicate the terrible stutters that have been plaguing me for years… and as far as I’ve tested the only way to get an actual smooth frame-accurate experience nowadays is fullscreen + vsync + gsync (or sync to exact timing in RA specifically).
Sadly makes no difference. I wonder if I should try to actually install the vulkan SDK, although it’s not required.