Windows 11 has a new preview build with a very useful change for those using multiple monitors, in a move that will help save system resources to some extent.
The change is currently in testing – and the very first test channel, namely Canary – arrived late last week with build 25915.
What Microsoft has done is improved the way Windows 11 handles refresh rates so that when a PC has two (or more) monitors, different refresh rates can be used on multiple displays.
Previously, Windows 11 applied the refresh rate, which is a system-wide setting on both monitors, so now they can each have different refresh rates in this preview version. We’ll be back in a moment to discuss refresh rates in more detail and why this is important.
In elsewhere build 25915, Microsoft has customized Dynamic Refresh Rate (DRR), a feature that intelligently adjusts your monitor’s refresh rate depending on what you’re doing. (If you’re reading emails or performing other basic tasks, DRR will use a lower refresh rate, but if you need a smoother experience, such as scrolling through a large document with embedded images, a higher refresh rate will be used).
The change to DRR now means that if you’re in battery saving mode on your laptop, Windows 11 will stick to the lower refresh rate anyway to save power. In short, battery saving completely drowns out DRR, which is best if your notebook is about to succumb.
Analysis: A very refreshing change
Refresh rate means the rate at which the screen refreshes itself every second (measured in Hertz), or in other words, how many frames are displayed per second. Each monitor essentially displays a slideshow and you see a number of images (slides or frames) every second. (But always, in theory, so fast that you’ll never see the ‘joins’, so to speak – it should all be fluid, especially with a top-end PC and one of the best monitors out there).
The faster the refresh rate, the smoother and smoother the image will appear to your eyes (with caveats, like with games for example, your GPU and other components must have the horsepower to produce the required frames, and with demanding titles and resolutions, you can be a steep hill to climb).
So what this change does is allow a task like gaming on a primary monitor with a high refresh rate to hit say 240 Hz whereas if you have a second monitor where you just surf the web and maybe watch a video you can have that running at 60Hz. Since you don’t need more than 60Hz on that second screen, you can save your PC the trouble of pushing both monitors to a higher refresh rate.
That means fewer system resources are used and they can be used elsewhere, plus you might save a tiny bit of power to boot (it all adds up).
Of course, this means nothing to those who don’t have more than one monitor, but the DRR change will still be useful for those with a laptop who want to save energy when the battery is low.
Through Windows Central