Switching a game to Borderless

If Dissent tells you a game appears to be in exclusive fullscreen, the overlay cannot draw over it. Neither can Steam, Xbox Game Bar, Discord, or OBS's overlays. This is not a Dissent limitation — it is what exclusive fullscreen means.

Switching to Borderless fixes it, usually costs nothing, and takes about ten seconds.

The three display modes

Almost every game offers the same three, under slightly different names:

Mode	Also called	Can an overlay draw on it?
Fullscreen	Exclusive Fullscreen, Full Screen	❌ No
Borderless	Windowed Fullscreen, Borderless Window	✅ Yes
Windowed	—	✅ Yes

Borderless looks identical to fullscreen. It fills the whole screen with no title bar and no borders. The difference is that the game shares the display with the desktop instead of taking exclusive control of it.

What you give up

Honestly: on a modern machine, usually nothing you will notice.

• Alt-tabbing gets faster, not slower — there is no mode switch.
• Frame pacing can differ very slightly. Exclusive fullscreen historically allowed a game to bypass the desktop compositor. On Windows 10 and 11, Fullscreen Optimizations means most games already run through a flip-model path that closely matches it.
• G-Sync / FreeSync work in borderless on current drivers. This used to be a real reason to prefer exclusive; it generally is not any more.
• Some older titles genuinely perform better in exclusive fullscreen. If a game is one of them, keep it there — you simply will not get the overlay in that game, and Dissent will say so rather than failing silently.

Where the setting lives

It is nearly always in the video or display settings, as Display Mode, Window Mode, or Screen Mode.

• Steam games — many expose it under Settings › Video or Options › Graphics. A few only expose it in a launcher before the game starts.
• Unreal Engine games — usually Settings › Video › Window Mode.
• Unity games — often a launcher checkbox labelled Windowed, plus an in-game Display Mode.
• Launcher-wrapped games (Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net) — the setting is in the game, not the launcher.

If you cannot find it

Search the web for <game name> borderless windowed. Nearly every game has a community answer, and many have a config-file option when the menu does not expose one.

Checking it worked

Open Settings › Clip Capture in Dissent and scroll to the overlay status block, just above Games to watch. It should go from red to green within a second or two — you do not need to restart Dissent or the game.

If it stays red while the game is definitely borderless, that is a bug worth reporting: the detection asks Windows whether any exclusive-fullscreen application is running, so another app could be the one holding it.

Why Dissent will not inject into your game

The alternative to a transparent window is injecting code into the game's process, which is what some overlays do. Dissent does not, and will not:

• Anti-cheat systems treat injection as an attack. A false positive there can get your account banned, permanently, and that would be attributed to Dissent.
• It means maintaining hook chains for DirectX 11, DirectX 12, Vulkan and OpenGL, which break on driver updates and game patches. Every breakage looks to you like "Dissent crashed my game".

A transparent always-on-top window is what Steam, Xbox Game Bar and OBS use, and it is not an anti-cheat violation. The cost is that exclusive fullscreen is out of reach — so Dissent detects it and tells you, rather than quietly doing nothing.