What Is a Game Overlay? How Overlays Draw Over Games

Almost everyone who plays on PC has used an overlay, usually without thinking about it. The friends list that pops up over a game, the frame rate counter in the corner, the recording notification: none of those are part of the game. They are drawn on top of it.

What a game overlay is

An overlay is a layer of graphics drawn over a game by another program. The game renders its frame as normal, and the overlay adds its own elements on top before you see the result.

Common overlays include:

How overlays draw on top of a game

There are two broad approaches.

Inside the game’s frames

Every game hands a finished frame to Windows to put on screen, many times a second. Some overlays attach themselves to that step: just before the frame is shown, they add their own graphics to it. Steam, Discord and RTSS all work this way. Because the overlay becomes part of the frame, it shows in any display mode.

In a window above the game

The other approach is a separate, transparent window that sits above the game and lets mouse clicks pass through it. The game never knows it is there. This works as long as Windows is allowed to put windows over the game, which depends on the display mode.

Why display mode matters

Games usually offer three display modes, and they behave very differently with overlays.

• Exclusive fullscreen. The game takes direct control of the display. Windows cannot place anything over it, so overlays that use a separate window disappear or flicker.
• Borderless windowed, sometimes called windowed fullscreen. The game is a window that fills the screen. Windows composes it with everything else, so overlays sit on top normally.
• Windowed. The same as borderless, with a frame around it.

That is why almost every overlay guide, ours included, starts with borderless windowed. Elocarry’s overlay does not support exclusive fullscreen at all, and any windowed or borderless resolution works.

When overlays clash

Overlays that draw inside the game’s frames all attach to the same step. One or two usually live together happily. Several at once, or one that is badly behaved, can cause:

• one overlay hiding another
• flicker or a black overlay
• stutter and frame drops
• crashes when the game starts or changes resolution

The fix is nearly always the same: turn off the overlays you do not need. GPU overlays, recording overlays and tools like Overwolf are the usual suspects.

Overlays and performance

Drawing a few lines and labels costs very little. What costs frame rate is background work that some overlays do, especially instant replay and clipping features that record your game constantly. Turning those off is one of the quickest performance fixes there is.

For Elocarry’s overlay, the support guides add a few settings that are required rather than optional: Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling switched on in Windows, the latest NVIDIA or AMD driver, and the GPU’s own overlay switched off.

Cheat overlays

Cheat menus and ESP are overlays too. An external cheat draws through a window above the game. An internal one can draw inside the game’s own frames. Either way the same rules apply, which is why cheat troubleshooting looks so much like ordinary overlay troubleshooting.

For Elocarry builds, the setup rules come straight from the support library:

• Set the game to borderless or windowed fullscreen. Exclusive fullscreen is not supported.
• Make sure the Discord overlay or RTSS is set up, and run Discord as administrator.
• Turn off the NVIDIA or AMD overlay, Overwolf and any clipping or auto replay.
• Do not plug or unplug monitors while the build is loading.

Stream-proof overlays

Screen capture records what Windows composes, and that normally includes overlays. Elocarry’s overlay is stream-proof by default: recordings, streams and screen shares show a clean game while you still see the overlay. The streamproof guide covers how to test a private recording before you go live.

Fixing an overlay that will not show

If the overlay still will not show in an Elocarry build, the F5 debug console in game tells support what is going on, and the overlay not showing guide walks through the checks in order.