1. A method for a computer system having a system frame buffer and multiple surface buffers allocated in video memory, the method comprising: automatically detecting that a window surface associated with a first application is an exclusive window surface for a display; automatically transitioning to a full-screen mode in which a graphics processor flushes content to the display including changing from flushing the system frame buffer to flipping between flushing a front surface buffer and a back surface buffer associated with the first application, the transitioning to the full-screen mode in response to detecting the exclusive window surface; automatically detecting that the window surface associated with the first application is not an exclusive window surface for the display; and automatically transitioning to a windowed mode in which the graphics processor flushes content to the display including changing from flipping between flushing the front and back surface buffers to flushing the system frame buffer, wherein transitioning to the windowed mode includes copying the system frame buffer to one of the front and back surface buffers depending on which of the front and back surface buffers is currently being flushed.