Lag monster...

[JustAGuy]

I'm not sure what the term is for this, but if you view something (okay, talking moving things) in smaller size, it will always look smoother.

While that is true, this is not the case here. I mentioned in an earlier post that I resize my desktop area to 800x600. The viewable area of the window is cut down by the height of the top bar (20 pixels?). It's not a big deal, as all skills and descriptions, and belt contents, are still viewable, but the effect is noticeable. So, when I play in a window, it's on an 800x600 desktop, of which the Diablo 2 window covers everything, except for a 2 or 3 pixel high row at the bottom of the screen (I move the window up a bit).

I see what you mean, though; the refresh rate of the game is on a set timer. The fact that my fps is so high just means that the game dips below the hard-coded cut-off point (the in-game 25 fps limitation) far less than it does in full-screen. When I say "smoother", I mean less dropped frames, and less jittering due to hard drive loading, cd-loading etc., not that there are more frames per second in character animations or anything like that. The game stays at it's set 25 fps (or whatever it is) more of the time. It's odd that the window reports 85 fps+ when it really makes no difference in the actual animation smoothness. The 85 fps just means that the machine is drawing the same thing over again a whole lot.

There is a noticeable difference between windowed performance and full screen performance, though. I experience it whenever I go to full-screen mode as the majority of my game-time is played in a window. Of course, the fps goes down with the map on, and all sorts of effects appearing on screen (fire, ice, etc. The thing still bogs down to 0 fps when shenk dies), but for most areas, the game maintains 60+ fps in a window. Without the map on, standing in town act 1, I get 85 fps. It's not always super high, but it's mostly high, and the fact that it CAN get to 85 (even 100) means that it's churning out these graphics far better than I can ever get full screen, ergo it's smoother in window.

This is my performance. On both of my machines here (and the ones I have at work... Don't tell anyone from my job that I know this), windowed performance has always been better than full screen. There's actually an irritating bug with my Diablo on my second home machine -- it keeps crashing at then end of acts. ACCESS_VIOLATION whenever the bugger finishes an act (all acts! Not related to cinematics though, as Windowed diablo doesn't try to play them). Must be a bug with my video card diver (it's very crappy and old).

Edit: Removed two pictures -- my hosting is pure CRAP. I also changed the wording of a few things since they referenced the pictures that no longer exist.