I started tinkering with an _update60 cart the other day and I was getting stuttery behavior.

Dug deep into possible performance bugs in my game. Then realized I had stuttery graphics (< 60 fps) in simpler cartridges.

Dug deep into updating drivers and BIOS on my Dell laptop. Still nothing. This laptop is from 2012, but is more powerful than my rpi3 which has no problem with _update60.

Then, I took a look at PICO-8's own config.txt file and found fullscreen_method. Tried method 2, which is actual fullscreen rather than stretching a window.

Totally resolved the issue.

How come 2 is not the default? Or maybe it is in fact the default and I'm forgetting having toyed with this months ago.

> How come 2 is not the default?

It is not the default because PICO-8 is correctly following the de facto standard of using a whole-screen-sized borderless window; as far as I am aware, this has been how most programs handle fullscreen for the past several years now, because it avoids changing the display mode of the monitor. Switching the display mode causes a lot of problems, e.g. it's slow to switch, looks blurry on LCD screens (since they unlike CRTs can only actually display pixels at one "native" resolution), and it can cause annoying problems with various OS's window managers. So since modern GPUs (even basic integrated ones) are usually (when everything is working correctly) able to scale the stuff up without incurring any performance penalty (especially for simple 2D stuff like PICO-8) it has become the preferred method for doing fullscreen.

I've actually kind of inferred that that is the standard, in general. So, I imagine that my laptop is just getting old and dated. It doesn't even let me change hardware acceleration settings on windows desktop like other computers have, for example, which might be the root of this.

What's weird though is, I have a Love2D program I've been working on lately which uses a full screen borderless window and it is buttery smooth so... oh well. I just need a new laptop ^.^

yeah that's really weird. maybe LÖVE is doing something slightly different that this apparently picky video driver likes better