Windows 11’s new feature for PC gamers banishes the RGB-related bloat

Wave goodbye to all those third-party apps for RGB lighting control

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Windows 11is getting a previously rumored feature to give users centralized control over peripherals with RGB lighting.

This wasanotherofmany revelationspertaining toWindows 11atMicrosoft’s Build conference, and was detailed in a lengthyblog postby Panos Panay, who’s Chief Product Officer for Windows and Devices.

The feature is called Dynamic Lighting (in the Settings panel) and the promise is that Windows 11 will make it easy to “effortlessly set up and customize devices with RGB lights”.

The ability to control all RGB lighting needs from one central Dynamic Lighting hub in Windows 11 is important, because as Panay observes, if you have multiple devices, it can be a real pain to install a bunch of apps from different manufacturers to deal with the lighting controls for those peripherals.

We’re told that Dynamic Lighting will be going into testing later this month, meaning in the next week, so we’ll get to see it in action in Windows 11 preview builds soon enough.

The workings of the feature werepreviously uncovered in testing back in February, so this addition is not a surprise.

Analysis: Over the moon, or not interested – which are you?

This is a feature you either won’t care about – if you’re not a gamer, or you hate RGB lighting and think it’s a load of showy nonsense – or you’ll be over the moon that it’s arriving.

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While it might not sound like a huge addition to Windows, we can’t underestimate what a boon it’ll be not to have to install multiple third-party apps to control lighting if you have, say, an RGB mouse,gaming keyboard, headset, and maybe some case lights, and so on – all from different vendors.

Those various apps can add up to a lot of bloat for the system – particularly in the case of some of these clients, which can be worse offenders in terms of bogging down the system than others – and you can avoid all this with Windows 11’s RGB hub.

Plus, of course, just having all the controls present in one handy settings panel is just so much more convenient than having to work across multiple RGB-related apps.

With the feature entering testing imminently, we can hope to see the Dynamic Lighting hub inbound with the big 23H2 update later this year, where it’ll certainly help to liven up what’sthreatening to be a bit of a yawn-fest currently.

ViaPC Gamer

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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