Windows Animations
⚠️
PLEASE READ THESE NOTES:
- Packaged & System Apps: Some protected or system-hosted windows, such as parts of Settings, Microsoft Store, and Windows shell surfaces, will not be animated because they bypass the mod's interception and use native Windows transitions instead.
- Browsers & Tray Apps: Enable "Animate windows hidden to the tray" if you want close animations for apps such as Chrome, Edge, Discord, and Windhawk, because clicking the 'X' button may only hide their window or leave the app running instead of actually closing it.
- MMC Consoles: Services, Task Scheduler, Event Viewer, and other
mmc.exesnap-ins are excluded and use native Windows transitions.- Excel: Close animations use an unobscured screen snapshot, never
PrintWindow. If the workbook window can't be captured safely, its close uses the native transition instead. When another workbook window remains open, Excel can finish closing while the captured image continues animating.
🏞️ Animation Gallery
Close Effects - 6 Styles
| Animation | Preview |
|---|---|
| Square Shatter |  |
| Thanos Snap |  |
| Perlin Dissolve |  |
| Cyber Glitch |  |
| Retro TV Off |  |
| Pixel Melt |  |
Minimize, Restore and Launch - 8 Styles
| Animation | Preview |
|---|---|
| Genie |  |
| Windows 10 | Preview coming soon |
| Ink Splash |  |
| Scorch |  |
| Splinter |  |
| Mirage |  |
| Stipple |  |
| Swell |  |
Alt+Tab Switch
| View | Preview |
|---|---|
| Before |  |
| After |  |
Compatible Simple Window Switcher builds also trigger this effect for confirmed keyboard and touchpad selections. Both mods must support selection notifications; cancelling the switcher does not trigger an animation. Minimized selections use the restore animation instead of a second switch effect. Compatible builds hand restoration to the target window's UI thread; unsupported targets retain the switcher's native restore path.
⚡ Hybrid Renderer
The GPU toggles allow acceleration where it measured well; they do not force every effect onto the GPU. Turning a toggle off forces its entire animation group to use the CPU.
| Animation | Renderer selected | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Normal minimize | CPU layered window | Faster in matched minimize tests and avoids native taskbar-state flicker. |
| Normal restore | D3D11 + DirectComposition | Avoids layered-window synchronization and is consistently faster. Show Desktop uses either the classic sequential mode or Windows' native batch animation, depending on its setting. |
| Animated launch | D3D11 + DirectComposition when warm and compatible; otherwise CPU | Reuses the restore path without making a cold GPU startup block the first window. |
| Close: Thanos or Perlin, 1 px blocks, at least 1.5 million source pixels | D3D11 + layered window | Dense particle work can outweigh the fixed synchronization cost. |
| Other close workloads | CPU layered window | Faster for ordinary windows, larger blocks, and the other four close effects. |
| Alt+Tab switch | Native DWM thumbnail | Independent of both GPU settings. |
A full-GPU prototype was tested before this hybrid design was chosen. Restores benefited strongly, but ordinary minimizes and closes became slower because their GPU output still had to synchronize with a layered window. A DirectComposition minimize prototype removed that cost, but Windows' final native taskbar handoff could intermittently flicker, so it was not shipped.
Benchmark snapshot
Lower frame cost is better. Values in parentheses are speedups over version 1.2.0. Each value is the geometric mean of per-effect median frame cost, with 10 measured animations per effect after two warm-up runs.
| Workload | 1.2.0 CPU | Optimized CPU | Forced-GPU prototype | Frame coverage 1.2/CPU/GPU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taskbar minimize, 8 effects | 1.29 ms | 1.30 ms (0.99x) | 3.71 ms (0.35x) | 100%/100%/100% |
| Taskbar restore, 8 effects | 1.35 ms | 1.39 ms (0.97x) | 0.45 ms (3.02x) | 100%/100%/100% |
| Normal close, 5 px, 6 effects | 1.97 ms | 1.95 ms (1.01x) | 4.78 ms (0.41x) | 100%/100%/100% |
| Full-screen dense close, 1 px, 3 effects | 16.28 ms | 9.97 ms (1.63x) | 9.19 ms (1.77x) | 29%/60%/57% |
Read the full benchmark methodology and per-effect results.
ℹ️ More Information
📝 Credits
Special thanks to @Abdullah Masood for the Classic Genie animation from his macOS Minimize Animation mod.
💖 Support Windows Animations
| 🌍 International (Ko-fi) | 🇻🇳 Vietnam (Techcombank) |
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