Fps drop after alt tabbing in games

Currently happening a lot in gw2 and its VERY annoying. When it happens my fps drops to 15-20 and stay like that until i completely reboot my pc... Is there a fix or a trick for this? I remember it happened to me a lot in Skyrim as well.

Pretty sure it depends on the game. Some games have no issues with alt-tabbing, some will completely crash the game.

Personally, I think nowadays, most games should be programmed to be "alt-tabbable". I mean who doesn't alt-tab? (Unless using Steam/Origin overlay, I guess).

I never played GW2 but if there's an option called windowed-borderless then you should try that. Some games call it exclusive full screen, in that case you should uncheck it. It looks the same as full screen, but it uses more memory.

Definitely don't do that unless you have good hardware. You will see a major FPS drop in most games using borderless instead of full screen. You can always shift+tab and use the ingame browser in Steam if you have the overlay, but I haven't really had a problem tabbing out in most modern games.

Some games automatically go into that borderless windows mode when you alt+tab (Thief does this) and when you get back into the game you get a serious performance hit. Although not sure why you have to reboot your entire PC for it to correct itself.

so its common issue heh? well that sucks, i thought it was my gpu drivers or something

Maybe your GPU clocks down when you alt tab and isn't clocking back up?

If Alt+Enter works to change it into Windowed, do that and then go back into the game and hit Alt+Enter again.

it does clocks down but even if i put it back it doesn't increase fps

Depends on your game and probably should have something to do with RAM. When I'm playing MMOs like Eclipse War and Aura kingdom on my desktop and used alt+tab to check on my browser, everything is fine. But when I do the same thing on my sister's notebook, it takes forever and sometimes it crashes the game. So, to be on the safe side, add more RAM. And if you can afford it, change PSU or video card as well.

Depends on the game, I get the same fps in most games in boarderless.

i have a 2500k, gtx570, 8gb of rip jaws, 850W CM psu so i don't think that's the problem.

How about updating drivers and checking for memory leaks?

driver are always up to date but what do you mean memory leaks?

@silversix_: Here's an explanation from Microsoft: Memory Leaks