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[D2D] Hardware Accelerated messes with G-Sync when skin is drawn over a game

Backwards compatibility issues related to the conversion of Rainmeter to D2D.
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SkyyDX
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Joined: April 13th, 2019, 2:26 pm

[D2D] Hardware Accelerated messes with G-Sync when skin is drawn over a game

Post by SkyyDX »

I just registered to make everyone aware of a small edge-case problem with the new Rainmeter Hardware Acceleration. I'm using Rainmeter with quite a few skins, one of them is a clock and set to "Always on Top" so I can have it on-top of the Windows Taskbar instead of the regular Windows clock and also have a clock I can see while gaming as I play most of my games in Borderless Windowed Mode.

For a few weeks I had issues with Windowed G-Sync having terrible stutters to the point where I felt it was better to play games without G-Sync and I updated to the new Rainmeter Beta and activated Hardware Acceleration at the same time the issue appeared but since I also updated my GPU drivers at the same day I chalked it up to Nvidia having wonky drivers again as Windows 10 and Windowed G-Sync have a history of not working well together. This morning I had a random thought though, while playing a game in Borderless mode I stared at my Rainmeter clock and wondered if it might be the cause of my G-Sync issues so I quit Rainmeter and suddenly Windowed G-Sync was buttery smooth again. Then I remembered that D2D Hardware Acceleration is a thing now with RM, disabled it and sure enough G-Sync was working fine again with Rainmeter back on.

I don't think that this is a bug per-say and something the Rainmeter Team should look into as I feel this is outside of the scope of Rainmeter, especially since I doubt many people have skins running as "Always on Top" but at the same time it might be nice to add a tool-tip or warning the first time Rainmeter is launched with Hardware Acceleration that it can potentially cause issues with G-Sync when skins are drawn over games and other 3D Applications.

G-Sync issues are random enough to troubleshoot as it is so having one pointer for potential issues would be nice if someone uses Rainmeter.
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