Overview
Some people, like myself, can’t set the game to fullscreen, with or without the 3D acceleration. This is how to bastardize your way into a sort of fullscreen experience.
Steps
- Boot up Plants vs Zombies in windowed mode.
- Open up the Intel (R) UHD Graphics Control Panel (ctrl + alt + F12).
- Click on “Display” in the lower left-hand corner
- Either switch to 800 x 600 or go into “Custom Resolutions” and create one, then go back to “General Settings” and switch to it.
- Check “Scale Fullscreen” under “Scaling”.
Basically, the game thinks it’s windowed, but the screen will act as though it’s fullscreen with the exception of the title bar at the top. The only problem is the inability to see the wave progress, but you can just drag the title bar off the top of the screen, which pauses the game as you drag. It’ll reset to its previous non-flag-displaying position once you release.
Quality of Life
There are a couple of ways to streamline the process for repeat performance.
- Pin the graphics panel to your taskbar.
- Click “Save Profile” instead of applying, and name the 800 x 600 “PvZ”.
- Click “Save Profile” again for your normal/preferred display settings and name it “Normal”.
Thereby you never have to do the technical bits again; it’ll be right at your fingertips. All “Profile Names” can be whatever you’d like, I just used what I did as an example. Also, the profile thing seems to have cleaned up the issue with the bottom of the UI not displaying.
If your taskbar pops up, here’s how to solve it:
- Right-click on your taskbar.
- Open “Taskbar Settings”.
- Click “Automatically hide taskbar in Desktop/Tablet mode” (depending on what you’re using).
- You can also optionally pin your taskbar settings so you never have to right-click it up again.