Spoiler: Windows 11 HDR often looks bad for browsing and gaming. That’s largely because Microsoft’s latest OS was primarily designed with SDR in mind. There are so many subpar HDR PC displays in the current market that prioritizing a screen that does justice to High Dynamic Range content on your rig should be far down your list of priorities when picking up a new monitor.

Screen resolution, refresh rates, and color accuracy all matter more than specific HDR settings/owning an HDR-compatible display. If you’re currently on an SDR screen and are thinking about making the upgrade to an HDR panel to benefit your Windows 11 PC, make sure you have the following display settings correctly calibrated on your setup before splurging on a potentially unnecessary monitor upgrade.

Refresh rate matters most

Concentrate on max hertz before HDR

Even if you know how to get the best out of HDR on Windows 11, I’d argue the refresh rate settings of the monitor/display you have hooked up to your PC or laptop matter way more than how High Dynamic Range content is displayed. Whether using your Windows device mainly for gaming or productivity, the hertz your screen is pumping out is of vital importance.

The best 120Hz gaming monitors often boast response times that are under 0.01ms. This means gaming on these displays can feel incredibly responsive. With HDR content on Windows remaining so patchy, it’s more important to ensure your picture is outputting at the maximum refresh rate your monitor is capable of.

Whether you’re on a 120Hz screen and are accidentally still set to 60Hz, or you’re lucky enough to own a 240Hz panel, your display settings are stuck on 120Hz, ensuring you’re interacting with your desktop at the fastest, most responsive refresh rate is key. Speedy browser navigation and pin-sharp gaming responsiveness are definitely more important than the slightly more vivid images HDR can provide.

Resolution is key

4K over HDR all day long

Always, always prioritize native screen resolution over HDR performance. Obviously, almost all modern hi-res PC monitors also support HDR. Yet if it comes to choosing a monitor that pumps out higher screen brightness in HDR, yet that result comes at 1080p over, say, a dimmer 1440p or 4K display, I’d go with the sharper screen all the livelong day.

Context, in this case, is clearly vital. If your face is pressed close to a monitor while working from a desk, either at home or in an office, 32-inches is probably the maximum screen size you need. In these instances, a 1080p panel is perfectly fine. If you do a lot of high-level multitasking though, like I do on a super ultrawide monitor I didn’t know I needed until I worked from my apartment, increased screen real estate matters. On super-sized panels, a resolution bump matters more than HDR performance.

Whether I’m playing my favorite Steam games at high refresh rates at 5120 x 1440 on my Samsung Odyssey G9 OLED G9 monitor, or editing images in Photoshop at this crisp resolution, I’d always opt for screen sharpness over slightly punchier HDR pictures.

Get your colors right

Proper color calibration is crucial

If you’re a prosumer Windows user who does a lot of high-end image or video editing, making your display’s colors as accurate as possible should be more important than HDR settings. Selecting the correct color profile and adjusting hues to look correct can be key if you make your living from manipulating photos or video footage.

Windows’ default Display Color Calibration app is a fairly useful piece of software in terms of setting both gamma and color settings to look reasonably accurate on your display. You can also hop onto the Windows Store to download both free and paid-for calibration apps that should make hues look accurate on your panel. While HDR settings can make a big difference in the best Steam games, for folks who primarily use their laptops/PCs for work purposes, color accuracy should be prioritized over HDR bells and whistles.

Don’t sleep on hardware acceleration

Your display needs the best out of your GPU

If you own a decent graphics card, you should make enabling hardware acceleration a priority over fussing around with HDR settings. So many modern games can be incredibly demanding on CPUs, so if you want to lighten the load on your processor, a great way is to hand compute-intensive tasks off to your GPU via hardware acceleration.

As someone who has been using Team Green GPUs for almost two decades, making this switch via the Nvidia Control Panel is simple and comes with few downsides. Hardware acceleration can not only improve gaming performance but also video processing and image editing. Craving the smoothest overall desktop experience your system is capable of? Turning on hardware acceleration is going to give you more immediately appreciable display benefits compared to HDR.

Your eyes need correct DPI scaling

Get this setting wrong, and your peepers are gonna hurt

Eye care is important. Never more so than when so many of us aren’t just glued to screens for eight hours every work day, we then go on to spend the rest of our waking existence doomscrolling on a smartphone. To keep your peepers in better shape, it’s important to reduce eyestrain. This is an area where correct DPI scaling on your PC screen can genuinely help.

4K screens are incredibly pixel-dense, so to reduce straining, it’s a good idea to increase the zoom features of Microsoft’s OS through Windows display settings. In the case of Windows 11, it’s usually reasonably good at judging the zoom level based on your current resolution output, but it’s always good to play around. I replaced my monitor with a TV, and on my 77-inch LG OLED, I find 250% scaling is a good fit for my browsing/general desktop needs from around nine-feet away from my screen.

Larger text and bigger desktop icons mean you have to squint a lot less, and in my book, that’s more important than slightly increased HDR contrast levels.

With Windows, HDR definitely isn’t the key display setting

Microsoft simply hasn’t cracked HDR content on its most modern OS as of yet, and that’s not solely the software giant’s fault. When it comes to video games, developers need to take more care when it comes to the highly specific demands of PC ports. In an era where HDR performance on desktops and laptops continues to disappoint, you’re better off tweaking the above display settings before you overly fret about High Dynamic Content on your PC screen of choice.

Resolution

5120×1440

Screen Size

49-inch

Brand

Samsung

Connectivity

1x HDMI 2.1, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 2x USB-A 3.0, 1x Headphone Jack

Max. Refresh Rate

240Hz

Response Time

0.03ms

The Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 is a 49-inch super ultrawide gaming monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate.