Always on top -- OTHER programs


je_saist

 

Posted

I'd like to be able to run OTHER programs in an 'always on top' mode, but for whatever reason I can only get it to work in Windows XP and not in either Vista nor Windows 7.

I'm talking about having either a VLC video window or a MediaPlayerClassic-HomeCinema window as perma on-top so that I can watch a movie in the corner of my screen whilst I play (with the game in FULL SCREEN mode). I have the CPU and GPU power for it, it just doesn't work.

Ideas? Thoughts?


 

Posted

hmm, do you play windowed or fullscreen mode? Fullscreen "fights" "always on top" applications usually, especially on ATI cards from what I've heard (like mine).



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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Psychic Guardian View Post
hmm, do you play windowed or fullscreen mode? Fullscreen "fights" "always on top" applications usually, especially on ATI cards from what I've heard (like mine).
Fullscreen.

On my 3 PCs, I'm running all nvidia cards (GTX 280, 8800GTX, 8800GT).


 

Posted

yeah I've run into this when running windows 7 too. Since I am a brand newbie to win 7, I'd love to see what the solution to this is, if any!


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Posted

So far as I know, it just plain isn't possible to do anything about that right now.

The killer app for this, of course, is HeroStats, which can only be used in windowed mode under Windows 7 right now. Which is annoying to me, because on my machine, windowed mode gets about 1/4 the frame rate of full screen mode.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by seebs View Post
So far as I know, it just plain isn't possible to do anything about that right now.

The killer app for this, of course, is HeroStats, which can only be used in windowed mode under Windows 7 right now. Which is annoying to me, because on my machine, windowed mode gets about 1/4 the frame rate of full screen mode.
Really? I didn't think it made a difference . Maybe it's time I flip on Fullscreen Mode again, maybe I'll slide some UM bars and find out my computer isn't as sucky as I thought



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Posted

This page pretty much explains what's going on: http://grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

Microsoft has repeatedly tried to kill off the industry standard Graphics API, OpenGL, through-out successive versions of Microsoft Windows. Applications leveraging the OpenGL API under Microsoft's NT6 derived engines run into forced limitations designed explicitly to make OpenGL look bad, while making DirectX look good.

Unfortunately there is not a whole lot driver vendors or game developers can do to work around the limitations Microsoft imposes on the operating system itself. The OpenGL overlay issue is demonstrably unrelated to the Graphics driver itself, as both AMD and Nvidia use the same source code driver to expose OpenGL across all their driver release platforms, as well as the same source code driver to expose DirectX options across supported platforms.

Given that the game works as expected under NT5 with the exact same driver sets in use under NT6, as well as the exact same binary client code, the empirical evidence demonstrates it is entirely an artificial operating system limitation.


 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by je_saist View Post
This page pretty much explains what's going on: http://grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

Microsoft has repeatedly tried to kill off the industry standard Graphics API, OpenGL, through-out successive versions of Microsoft Windows. Applications leveraging the OpenGL API under Microsoft's NT6 derived engines run into forced limitations designed explicitly to make OpenGL look bad, while making DirectX look good.
....
Thanks for providing the info that keeps me from wondering if I'm doing something wrong.


 

Posted

I'm sure you have thought about this before, but to solve this problem, I just bought a cheap flat screen tv that hooks up with HDMI cables and run that as a second moniter. I bought a decent 22" LG tv that works just fine. I run movies and everything through it while playing on my main moniter.