You just bought a brand new monitor for pc gaming which is compatible with HDR, and of course when you use it to play games it looks fabulous. However, you notice that when you are at the office of Windows everything looks whitish, and ultimately the user experience is not good. What is going on? Can it be solved somehow? Yes you have solutionand in this article we tell you everything you have to do.
An HDR-capable monitor means it has maximum brightness above a certain level, allowing images to appear brighter and colors more vivid in games. However, unlike that excellent gaming experience, when you’re just on Windows you can see things quite poorly due to excessive brightness, so there are a few things you’ll need to configure to fix this.
How to Enable HDR in Windows
If you have a modern version of Windows, enabling HDR on your monitor is as easy as pressing the key combination WIN + ALT + B, and it’s exactly the same to turn it off, so you can easily fix this problem just by remembering that key combination and pressing it when you return to the Windows desktop. You can do the same by going to Windows display settings, turning it on and off manually (this will only be available if your monitor is HDR, of course).
However, this method also has its drawbacks, such as the screen goes black for a few seconds until it switches to SDR mode and vice versa, and also if you have multiple monitors and some of them are not HDR, that might sound a bit bad. when you activate this mode. For this reason, let’s move on to the next section.
Adjust SDR content on your HDR monitor
The problem with enabling HDR in Windows is that content that is SDR looks white, but the good part is that in Microsoft’s operating system you can adjust the behavior of that content so that it has the looks relatively good and without affecting performance. is HDR. To do this, go back to the display settings (just right click on an empty space on the desktop and you’ll have the option there) and click on the HDR monitor you want to configure (it’s the same capture of screen that we put before). Make sure HDR is enabled, then click “Use HDR”.
A screen like the one you see above these lines will appear. Here what you need to adjust is the slider bar at the bottom under “SDR Content Brightness” to your liking.
It’s best to use the HDR settings in the game itself.
Really, the best solution if you’re having these issues is to turn HDR on and off in game settings. Most titles that support this technology will detect if your monitor is compatible and let you adjust the intensity level. brightness. You will notice some flickering on the screen when you launch the game (at that time this mode was enabled on the monitor), but since this just happens when loading, that’s not a problem either.
This way we think it is the most comfortable for the user: when you are in Windows you use the SDR mode which looks perfectly fine, and when you enter the games its own configuration will activate the monitor HDR mode. so that they can be seen dramatically.