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Sometimes when I'm playing games which are heavy on the GPU, Windows decides to helpfully disable aero, causing everything to freeze for a bit and in the worst case, combined with ATI's brilliant drivers, causes the game to crash.

So,

How do I stop Windows from automatically disabling Aero when playing games? It has absolutely no effect on the performance of the game itself when it does that.

Also, I'd like to get rid of the "You should disable Aero to improve performance" helpful hint popup which sometimes shows up. But I suppose getting rid of the first will get rid of the second, assuming anyone knows how.

Oliver Salzburg
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Jani Hartikainen
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3 Answers3

1

The only times I've come across this is if the game is in Compatibility Mode with the "Disable themes" option set. Are you playing in compatibility mode?

rdrgrtz
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While this does not directly answer your question, you could solve your problem by disabling Aero while playing the game.

If you have a shortcut to your game, go

[right click] -> Compatibility -> Disable desktop composition -> OK

Dennis
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There are in my experience three reasons Aero gets disabled:

  1. The application has enabled the compatibility setting to disable Aero.
  2. Something is incompatible with Aero, like the overlay video renderer in Vista, or low color quality.
  3. The application requests that Aero is to be disabled.

Case 3 is the the usual case for games. In that case it is not a Windows setting you need to change but a game setting. And those settings aren't usually exposed in the Options dialogue. You'll have to edit ini files. The specifics depend on the game in question.

Case 2 can also rear its head with games. Usually due to some weird graphics setting or graphic driver problem.

Mr Alpha
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