Issues with the game starting / loading maps in fullscreen

Okay, luckily I'm not an epilepticant, but honestly, those people will die from how the game starts and loads on my PC.

It has _sadly _become a must for me to run the game in Fullscreen mode (that's another story, since the Windows 10 FCU randomly drops to 30 FPS at times in windowed modes, which is most probably not Anet's fault since other games have that problem too in FCU).

I say _sadly _because it flickers with white / black screens and the desktop 8-10 times before the character selection screen finally appears.The same happens when a map load completes, the loading screen flickers between the desktop and loading image several times.

Especially with a bright window opening on the desktop, this really kills off my eyes, even with enough room illumination.

I'm running Windows 10, had the issue on all builds since the original RTM so far, and have an AMD R9 390 with the most recent drivers.Am I the only one experiencing this or is the fullscreen mode that badly written?

No idea what FCU is, trying a google search results in several football clubs and official institutions for me. Apart from several win7 PCs I also have a windows 10 pc with GW2 but it exhibits no symptoms of flickering at game start at all.

My wife have same problem as you ... NTB lenovo, Win10 and its painful to watch...

Windows 10 alienware with latest NV drivers here and I have the same issue. I've been able to reduce the flickering by running in Vista Service Pack 2 compatibility mode and turning on override dpi scaling and setting it to application. I now only get about 1 flicker at boot up and none on map changes.

Interesting tip with the compatibility mode idea. I'm not getting any less flickering though. I have default DPI scaling on my desktop, and also run the game at my desktop settings, so I couldn't minimize it any further.

FCU means the (current) Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. It actually ships with Fullscreen Optimizations which do fix the flickering since, AFAIK, it forces specific surface formats of the ones the desktop uses (which also enables overlays like volume control) and prevents the switching the game apparently does, but I had to disable them in the compatibility tab since the game froze or did not come visible again after switching back to it.

My Win10 machine is not used very much so it did not have that windows update you talked of yet. So I installed it and checked, and there is no flickering whatsoever for me. GW2 is a standard install without any modification in start options or in ingame options. It basically was never changed from the default install.PS: PC runs at normal FullHD resolution, graphics card is only an old GTX 460 I had leftover while CPU is a Core i7 3770.

As I said, if you install FCU, Win10 will fix the flicker for ArenaNet by forcing some backbuffer format on the game to draw Windows UI controls on it (notice the volume slider if you use your keyboard volume keys for example), and in effect that eliminates the flickering at startup some users seem to have. So I guess the game heavily switches around modes or formats when it starts up. That's kinda fine for me now.

If you check "Disable Fullscreen Optimizations" on the compatibility tab, you get the pre-update behavior again, and the game flickers horribly when starting into fullscreen on the affected machines again.

Another issue with FCU is that it drops FPS to half for several seconds every few minutes when running in fake fullscreen mode (other games suffer from that too), but it's fine in fullscreen.Since it sometimes got my game to freeze when restoring back into fullscreen, I pretty much had no choice than going back to the pre-FCU Win10 version and run in nicely-working fake fullscreen there. Aren't thinks simple nowadays? :P

I don't have any flicker between loading screens and map display or switch from windowed mode to true fullscreen or back. It's completely seamless. So I could say: yes, that's possible. This was not always the case; I remember I had flickering for years in all kinds of games, and this vanished only a few months ago. May be some Nvidia video driver, may be some Windows update, may be some game update. I don't remember exactly, because I always played windowed due to that horrible flickering.Flickering was more intensive if the ingame refresh rate was not the same as the desktop refresh rate, and if the game resolution in fullscreen mode was not the same as the desktop resolution.Currently, I have GW2 in fullscreen mode with the same resolution as my desktop, and default/standard as refresh rate in GW2, and no flicker.My system:Desktop PC with i7 6700kNvidia GTX 1070 @2560x1440, driver version 388.13Windows 10 1709 automatically patched through internal updater

In the compatibilty setting of the GW2 shortcut, I changed nothing. It's all default.