How do I make RA run in a true borderless fullscreen mode?

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Right now, RA doesn’t seem to integrate with the Windows compositor. Alt-Tab works fine, but overlays like the volume indicator and Game Bar do not.

I have Fullscreen set to true, as well as Windowed Fullscreen.

Windows 10, if that helps.

1 Like
#2

I would like to know as well, my volume bar is never on top and if this is why I’d like to fix it lol

1 Like
#3

Hello -

I am bumping this thread as this is my exact issue. I am trying to use windows volume control across all of my emulators in my arcade and in all cases I am able to see the volume bar except for retroarch emulators. If I turn off full screen mode I see the volume bar but I need retroarch at full screen.

I am on windows 10 and using the GL video driver.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions.

I’m also happy to start a new thread since the thread I am replying to is so old.

Thanks.

#4

I believe this setting affects whether the volume control is visible during fullscreen: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/enable-disable-full-screen-optimizations-windows-10

#5

Thank you for the response!

I tried disabling full screen optimizations for Retroarch per the instructions, but no luck with the volume bar when using fullscreen.

#6

Hmm, aside from that, the borderless fullscreen option in settings > video is all I know to suggest.

#7

Thanks. Appreciate the info. I do have windowed full screen mode enabled too. I also tried editing through the registry per the article and no luck.

Hopefully there are other ideas.

Again, thanks for the suggestion.

#8

Disabling FSO makes sure the Windows overlays (like volume slider) do not show up. You got it backwards :stuck_out_tongue:

I believe automatic FSO only works with DX, not OpenGL. The correct way to get this working however is:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/dxgi-flip-model/

I don’t know if this only works with DX12 or is also possible with DX11.

#9

Thanks!

I had tried directx before (by changing driver in retroarch.cfg) and I was getting a black screen when I would load a game. I’ll play around with it more and see if I can make it work.

#10

Some cores will switch the driver back to something they actually support. For 2D-only cores though, or with software-rendered cores (like beetle-saturn or beetle-psx-hw or swanstation configured to use the software renderer instead of OpenGL or Vulkan) it should work fine.

#11

Thanks! I’m doing most of my testing with Mame and that’s what was switching back to GL. Shouldn’t it work with directx too?

#12

Ok, I tried all the drivers and gl and glcore do not show the windows volume bar. D3D11 the volume bar showed up but everything in the retroarch and the menu was really blurry and I wasn’t to fix that through settings. Sdl2 worked and showed the volume bar but now my overlays don’t show up. All of the other drivers either crashed or had very undesirable results.

Would be great to get the directx driver going but can’t seem to figure out the super blurriness I’m seeing.

Thanks for any input.

#13

DX11 is supposed to be working great. No idea why you get blur.

#14

Got it. I’ll see if my drivers need updating. Thanks for the quick response.

#15

I was able to get D3D11 working by modifying the compatibility mode of retroarch in windows to run as windows 7 compatible. Now everything is up and running and the volume bar works in game.

Thanks for everyone’s input on this!

1 Like