New Build - Cannot find this setting.

[vdub1.8t]

This is my first time building a PC and it went great! The only one thing I am having a lot of trouble with is... When I play a game and I do not have the window active (behind another program) the FPS goes way down to almost nothing. Then when I have the window active again the FPS goes back to normal. While reading the documentation I recieved with my hardware I remember seeing this setting but don't remember when it was. I have spent over an hour trying to find it again; manuals, bios, etc... I have an ASUS EAH3850/G/HTDI/256M Radeon HD 3850 graphics card and MSI P35 Neo Combo-F mobo. If anyone knows where I could find this setting to turn it off I would be forever grateful! Thank you everyone for your help.

[vdub1.8t]

Anyone? Thanks.

[supermep]

So you are playing the game in windowed mode while also looking at a web browser? And you want to make it run smoothly while it is not currently selected?

Is that the issue?

[vdub1.8t]

Hi supermep, thank you for the reply. Yes, basically that is the issue. If I am playing WoW in windowed mode and I open a browser or another program the FPS drops way down to almost nothing for WoW since the window is not active. As soon as I select WoW again the FPS shoots back up to normal. I realize this is so the graphics card doesn't need to work as hard when the game isn't selected but I would like to find where this specific setting is hiding. I cannot see to find it. Thanks for your help.

[supermep]

Ive looked up and down and all around and cannot find any setting that would affect that.

Anyone else have ideas?

[Tiber Septim]

I've had a look around and the only thing I came close to was that you will lose a lot of FPS if you run WoW in windowed mode at a different colour depth to Windows.
WoW only supports 24 and 16 bit, Windows only does 16 and 32. So running in 16 bit will look cruddy but give you more performance...

It may simply be transparency effects etc. dragging the FPS down when you don't have the game window selected. Try looking in your display settings under 'Appearance' and turning off things like shadowing or whatever looks like it may impact performance.

[vdub1.8t]

Thank you all for your help. I still feel like the setting can be turned off somewhere. I will keep looking. I know I saw it I just don't remember where. Argh.

[Aus_Karlos]

This could clear things up for you. When you run a game in windowed mode and are playing it, the game takes priority of all system hardware. But when you select another app like internet explorer, the games priority plummets and becomes second in line to the browser (The game has now been switched to background tasks).
So WOW has now only got limit resources of your GPU and CPU (Even tho browsers dont use much resources).
My PC is quite powerful and yet i have the same thing, its due to how 98, XP and Vista have been made/built/designed, they are not very good at multitasking. (Even if you have a Dual Core)

What Septim said is also true but if you run a game in 16 or 24 bit colour the majority of the time windows desktop also changes the colour depth and is restored when the application requiring that colour depth is closed.

[vdub1.8t]

Thank you all for your help!

[vdub1.8t]

Something else that I forgot to mention which leads me to believe this is a setting. If I am playing a game in Windowed Mode and I hover over (not clicking) the Windows task bar at the bottom the FPS goes down to almost nothing.