The Video settings in a DxWnd profile decide how the game’s picture is presented on a modern screen: frame-rate behaviour, colour-depth handling, and the presentation choices behind flicker and tearing. They are the second place to look for display problems — after you have confirmed the game hooks and opens in a window at all — and they are frequently confused with two neighbours: the window geometry on the Main tab, and the game-speed controls on the Timing tab. This guide keeps the three apart and explains what the Video area is actually for. It is part of our DxWnd settings guide.
First, What the Video Settings Are Not
Window size and placement live on the Main tab, covered in our window size and position guide. Game speed — a title whose logic runs too fast — is the Timing tab’s time stretching, not a video option. The Video area concerns the picture itself: how frames are produced and shown inside the window DxWnd has already created. Keeping that boundary clear saves hours, because no video option will move a window, and no geometry setting will fix a flicker.
Frame-Rate Behaviour
Classic games were written for hardware that drew slowly, and many simply render as fast as the machine allows. On a modern GPU that can mean hundreds of frames per second inside your window. The Video settings include the frame-rate side of DxWnd’s presentation handling — the options concerned with how the game’s drawing is paced and presented. Conceptually, pacing presentation does two things: it stops the wasteful spin of a game redrawing far beyond what your monitor can show, and for titles that tie their animation to frame delivery, it can calm an over-fast picture.
Be precise about what that can and cannot fix, though. Some games pace their logic by the clock rather than by frames, and those ignore presentation pacing entirely — the picture arrives smoothly while the game world still sprints. That is the frame-locked versus timer-based distinction, and it is why a game that is still too fast after video adjustments belongs to the Timing tab: our guide to games running too fast explains how to tell the two apart before you change anything.
Colour Depth: 8-Bit and 16-Bit Games on a 32-Bit Desktop
Your desktop runs at 32-bit colour. A large slice of the DxWnd back catalogue was drawn at 8-bit (256 colours, palette-based) or 16-bit colour, and something has to translate. The Video area’s colour-depth handling is that translation layer: how the game’s palette or 16-bit surface is converted for presentation in the window. When the translation goes wrong, the symptoms are famous — rainbow or inverted colours, menus that look fine until the palette changes mid-game, colours that break after an alt-tab. Those are palette problems, and they have their own dedicated walkthrough in our guide to fixing rainbow colours in old games; the video settings are where the underlying handling lives, and that guide shows the order to try things in.
Flicker, Tearing and the Black Window
Presentation is also where flicker comes from. A game that updates its picture in a way the windowed presentation path mishandles can shimmer, tear between frames, or — at the extreme — show nothing at all. If your window opens but stays black, do not start by randomly toggling video options: work through our black screen fixes first, which confirm the game is actually running and rendering before sending you here. Once you know the game is alive behind the blackness, video presentation options become a legitimate next step, changed one at a time.
The discipline matters more than any single option. Video settings interact: colour handling can affect whether a surface presents at all, and pacing can change whether a flicker is visible. Change one, test the same scene in the game, and note the result before touching the next. A profile built by random toggling is a profile nobody can reproduce.
Internal Resolution vs the Window You See
One more distinction prevents a common misdiagnosis. The game renders at its own internal resolution — whatever it was designed for, or whatever its own settings choose — and the video presentation layer then fits that picture into the window whose size the Main tab geometry decided. A soft or blurry picture in a large window is usually not a video failure at all: it is a low-resolution picture honestly scaled up, and no presentation option manufactures detail the game never drew. Conversely, a picture that looks crisp but updates unevenly is a pacing matter, which does belong here. Diagnosing which layer owns your symptom — rendering resolution, window geometry, or presentation — is worth the minute it takes, because each layer has its own settings and its own guide, and adjusting the wrong one produces the special frustration of a problem that changes without ever improving.
An Honest Note About Option Names
DxWnd is actively developed and its dialogs evolve: the exact labels and grouping of video options can differ slightly between builds. That is normal for a tool maintained across two decades, and it is why this guide describes the video concepts — pacing, colour-depth handling, presentation — rather than pretending every build shows identical checkboxes. The authoritative reference for your build ships with it: the official help manual in the help/ folder of your download has a dedicated Video section for exactly your version. If a name on your screen differs from a name here, trust your manual; the concept you are looking for will be there under its current label. You can make sure you are on the current build via our download page, and the full map of the settings dialog is in the settings guide.
The Short Version
Confirm the game hooks and windows correctly. If the picture flickers, tears, or shows wrong colours, you are in Video territory — pacing for frame behaviour, colour-depth handling for palette-era titles. If the game world’s speed is wrong while the picture is smooth, leave this tab and go to Timing. One change at a time, tested in the same scene, saved when it works: that is the whole method.