Borderless Fullscreen Crosshair Overlay

Three display modes on Windows

Most Windows games offer some combination of three display modes:

• Exclusive fullscreen — the game takes full control of the display.
• Borderless fullscreen (a.k.a. windowed fullscreen) — the game is technically a window, but it covers the entire screen with no border.
• Windowed — the game is a normal resizable window.

Why borderless fullscreen is recommended

In exclusive fullscreen, the game has tight control of the display surface, and the Windows compositor (DWM) is partially or fully bypassed. Standard third-party overlays — including CrosshairEDGE, Steam, Discord, and many others — render through DWM. When DWM is bypassed, those overlays can be hidden behind the game or not appear at all, depending on how the game is using the GPU.

In borderless fullscreen, the game is rendered as a window covering the screen, so DWM is fully in charge of compositing. That gives Windows overlays a reliable place to draw on top of the game, the way you would expect.

How to switch — quick guide

Most modern PC games expose this in their video settings:

1. Open the game's video / display settings.
2. Find the Window Mode or Display Mode option.
3. Choose Borderless, Borderless Window, or Windowed Fullscreen.
4. Apply the changes.

On modern hardware, borderless fullscreen typically performs essentially the same as exclusive fullscreen for high-refresh monitors, especially when DirectX Flip Model presentation is supported by the game. There may be tiny edge-case differences in latency or VRR behavior, but for the vast majority of players, borderless is the better default if you want overlays to work.

Other things to check

If you have switched to borderless fullscreen and the CrosshairEDGE crosshair still does not appear in a game, double-check:

• The crosshair is enabled (toggle with F1).
• The selected preset has visible segments and non-zero opacity.
• The app is on the same monitor as the game.
• The game is not using a strict anti-cheat that blocks all standard Windows overlays.

Anti-cheat caveat

Some games using restrictive anti-cheat systems may block or hide normal Windows overlays even in borderless fullscreen. CrosshairEDGE is overlay-only by design — it does not inject code, read game memory, or modify game files — but if the operating-system-level overlay is blocked, no standard overlay will appear, ours included. See the safe crosshair overlay page for more on the design.

Coming soon on Steam

CrosshairEDGE is coming to Steam for $5.99 USD. If a clean, customizable crosshair overlay sounds useful for your setup, add CrosshairEDGE to your Steam wishlist. For the full feature breakdown, head to the homepage.