What Is Steam Windowed Mode?

If a game hasn’t been optimized for use on your Windows device, you might have to deal with issues. These issues arise mostly when users try to run quite a demanding game on Steam on an outdated system. You might feel tempted to lower the graphics settings, the game might still crash or lag.

So, what is the solution? You might have heard of Steam Windowed Mode for Windows! Today’s article will delve into this topic and we will look at what Steam Windowed mode is and also how you can launch it.

What is Steam Windowed Mode?

Windowed mode in Steam can fix certain issues, however, these might not be compatible with a lot of games and so, you need to find another way to launch Steam games in windowed mode. There are a lot of benefits of using it in this mode as first and foremost, it will fix performance issues when the game is launched in full mode.

How to use Steam Windowed Mode?

There are a few ways to launch this mode and we will be listing them all out for you!

1. Utilize the Game Launcher

This method makes use of the game launcher to open Steam in windowed Mode.

• Right-click on the shortcut for the launcher and click on Properties.

• Here you will see a field titled, Target and it is the actual original location of the shortcut.

• You will add “–windowed” or –w following the quotation marks and then the game will run as a windowed version.

 

2. Tweak the in-game Settings

You can also check the in-game settings to see if there is an integrated option to launch windowed mode in that specific game in Window.

Depending on the mode you play, you will be able to tweak the settings. So if you are using a full-screen resolution after you change the settings, the size of your window should be the same once the full screen is off.

3. Utilize Steam Client

The last method is to set launch options using the Steam client. For this method, you need to understand your game launch options that will allow you to change your settings as you would like before the game is launched.

• To set the game launch options, you will launch the Steam library and click on the game that needs to be changed to windowed mode.
• Launch properties and then select Set Launch Options from the General tab.

• When you wish to add in a windowed mode parameter, you will type in “–windowed” in the field.

• You will also be able to add a parameter for the dimensions and width of the game window. There will be other launch options that you can take advantage of as well.

While it might be the simplest option out of them all, if you are not able to activate the Steam in windowed mode, then you might want to press and hold down the Alt and Enter keys together while you are playing the game. This tends to put the game into Windowed mode as well.

Finally, as an ending note, we would like to add that it is important to keep in mind that the issue might be because your computer itself is outdated. This might be causing most of the issues you have when running Steam. So, if none of these methods are successful to enter Steam Mode for you, we recommend that you try to change your computer.

 

We hope that this has been enough details on the topic of what Steam mode is and how to implement it in your games while playing on Steam. With that, we leave our readers with this article that covers all aspects of this process with our 3 main methods along with additional tips!