How to open the Game Bar on the secondary monitor on Windows 10

The Game Bar on Windows 10 favors the primary monitor in a multi-monitor set-up. This wouldn’t be so bad but the useful overlays it has e.g., the Performance overlay can’t be dragged to other monitors. It tends to stick to the primary monitor and will stick to the edge of it when you try and drag it off to a different screen. The workaround to this is pretty simple. Here’s how you can open the Game Bar on the secondary monitor on Windows 10.

This works regardless of how many monitors are set up with your system. The idea is the same. You just need to switch over to the monitor you want to open the Game Bar on.

Open Game Bar on secondary monitor

On your desktop, go to the secondary monitor that you want to open the Game Bar on. On this monitor, open any app of your choice. If the app opens on the primary window, drag it over to the secondary monitor. Once the app has been moved to the monitor you want to open the Game Bar on, tap the Win+G keyboard shortcut. This will open the Game Bar on the secondary monitor.

Once the Game Bar is open on the secondary monitor, you can enable its overlays and pin them to the secondary monitor. As with the primary monitor, you will not be able to drag these overlays off the secondary monitor and on to the primary one.

If you’re pinning the Performance overlay, you should know that the FPS reading will be for the monitor that it is open on. All other performance indicators such as GPU, CPU, and RAM will be reported for the system since they aren’t specific to a monitor.

Since this is a workaround, it does have limitations. If you open the Game Bar on a different monitor than the one you’ve pinned an overlay on, e.g., on your primary monitor, the overlay that’s pinned to the secondary monitor will jump to the primary one and stick there until you open the Game Bar on the secondary monitor again.

We often talk about multi-monitor support on both Windows 10 and macOS. Windows 10 has come a long way in recent years with respect to improving support for multiple monitors but with features like the Game Bar, you can still see where there’s still need for a lot of improvement. This particular shortcoming feels especially shortsighted considering it targets gamers who generally have more than one monitor.

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Fatima Wahab

Fatima has been writing for AddictiveTips for six years. She began as a junior writer and has been working as the Editor in Chief since 2014. Fatima gets an adrenaline rush from figuring out how technology works, and how to manipulate it. A well-designed app, something that solves a common everyday problem and looks

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