Wallpaper Engine is an amazing application that can help you customize your desktop background. It can instantly make you feel like you have a brand new pc every time you change your wallpaper.
It’s available on the Steam store for under $5. It is super worth it if you like animated wallpapers and interactive backgrounds. It’s one of the easiest and fastest ways to get an animated wallpaper.
To make your wallpaper move, Wallpaper Engine takes processing power that can affect your gaming performance. It continuously runs in the background and might be the reason why your FPS is dropping in-game. Find out how much Wallpaper Engine affects your gaming performance.
Does Wallpaper Engine Affect your In-Game Performance?
You might be noticing that Wallpaper Engine actually consumes quite a bit of processing power. This is especially true if you have a lot of moving or animated elements in your chosen wallpaper. It obviously requires power to run all of these small moving elements and particles across your screen.
But, the real question here is, how much power does Wallpaper Engine actually consume? And does Wallpaper Engine affect your gaming performance?
Well, the quick answer is no. Surprisingly, it doesn’t affect your gaming performance that much. You might lose a frame or two, but nothing too major to cause frame drops or lags. By default, Wallpaper Engine is set to automatically pause when you have other applications such as games or programs maximized or fullscreen.
This means that all the moving particles and elements within your wallpaper aren’t actually working if you aren’t directly looking at your desktop. Wallpaper Engine is set to stop all animations and only consumes a little bit of processing power to run the application itself.
The developers implemented this feature with gaming performance in mind. They didn’t want Wallpaper Engine to steal valuable resources from your game.
Why Are My Games Lagging When Wallpaper Engine Is Open?
If you are still experiencing lags or FPS drops when Wallpaper Engine is running in the background, there are a few things that you have to consider. First of all, you should definitely check your Wallpaper Engine settings.
- Click on the Wallpaper Engine icon on your taskbar.
- Select “Settings” and go to the “Performance” tab.
- Make sure that all settings under “Playback” are set to “Pause all.”
By default, when an application is maximized or in fullscreen, Wallpaper Engine should pause. But you might’ve accidentally changed the settings, so it’s definitely worth checking out.
While you’re here, you might want to lower the settings under “Quality” as well. This reduces the overall quality of the animations and elements in your wallpaper, resulting in lower processing needs.
If you’re still experiencing FPS drops or lags while playing, your computer might just not have enough resources. Wallpaper Engine is designed to take up as little resources as possible when you are playing a game. However, if your PC is already quite weak, to begin with, then you might run into problems.
Common problems include insufficient RAM or a weak CPU or GPU. Unfortunately, there’s nothing much that you can do about this problem. I suggest simply closing Wallpaper Engine when you’re about to play a game and re-opening it after you are done.
Other than that, you shouldn’t be worrying about Wallpaper Engine that much. It has very little effect on your gaming performance, and something else might be hindering it instead.
