Does your screen dim or get darker whenever you play your favorite games on Windows 10?
Well, you are not alone!
Whenever you play games, the screen dims are highly possible for several reasons, including the automatic brightness settings, your monitor features, or outdated drivers for your component.
Windows 10 operating system is the latest and probably the best among any other Microsoft OS.
But unfortunately, this particular version tends to be a tad bit funny.
One of the examples is Windows 10 screen gets darker when playing games.
It is not something strange anymore, since the problem happens way before on Windows 7 and 8.
But why this problem always happens?
It is even more frequent with the recent Win10 updates.
To help you with that, here is what you should know and learn about.
So, continue to read on!
Table of Contents
Why Does Windows 10 Keep Dimming?
You already update your operating system of Windows 10 to the latest one, but then your screen gets darker as you play the full-screen game.
Don’t worry. This is not something new since the problems are very common.
I have tested many PC and gaming laptops in the last 20 years, and this problem is quite common.
But then why is it happening?
From my experience, there are many reasons why the problem occurs.
Your power saver settings, outdated drivers, auto-dimming features on your monitor, your GPU were acting up and lost its color profile, and many other reasons.
Let’s start with the first possible culprit, the auto-dimming features.
Often, the screen dims when playing games on Windows 10 started because your monitor has this feature.
It allows the system to adjust the brightness automatically.
It is not common, especially for laptop or desktop monitor.
But, the recent desktop monitor products might have these particular features.
If it does have the feature, you should try to disable the features.
If possible, we suggest you to try hooking up another monitor to see if the problem persists.
Another thing to consider is the Windows 10 automatic brightness adjustments.
This problem usually occurs if you are using a gaming laptop that has a light sensor.
Windows 10 will try to stabilize the light in your screen with your ambient light level, similar to how auto-brightness works in smartphones.
Your Windows 10 will do this to save your laptop battery so you can use your laptop longer.
The next thing you want to check is your Windows 10 Power Settings.
If you put your Windows 10 Power Settings on power-saving mode, Windows 10 will sometimes adjust your brightness level and dim your screen whenever you use a power-intensive application.
You might also want to check your graphics card settings if you are using a dedicated graphics card on your system.
Sometimes, some games will make your graphics card act up by displaying the wrong color, making your screen look dim or darker.
Lastly, you should check your Windows 10 drivers.
Make sure everything is up to date because many times, the culprit of Screen Dims When Playing Games on Windows 10 is because the driver is not updated.
How do I Stop My Screen from Dimming on Windows 10?
Now you know what might cause your screen to dim when playing games.
So, how to stop it?
First of all, you should find out the real culprit of the dimming screen.
Check all the possibilities.
Does it because of your brand new monitor?
Is it because your computer laptop has a light sensor or because of other power settings you choose on your Windows 10?
Auto-Dimming Features on Monitor
You can start by switching your monitor with different ones.
If the problem does not appear on other monitors, you should take a look at your monitor user guide.
Recently released monitor like my LG gaming monitor has these auto-dimming features that help save energy and power.
So you might want to disable this feature manually to prevent your monitor from dimming automatically when playing games.
Different brands will have different ways on how to access this feature. I suggest you read the user manual of your monitor carefully.
Adjusting Your Power Setting to Disable Adaptive Brightness
If your monitor is not the real culprit, you might want to adjust your power setting to disable the adaptive brightness feature on your Windows 10.
To disable this feature, you want to follow this step:
Control Panel -> Power Options -> Change plan settings -> Change advanced power settings -> Display -> Enable Adaptive Brightness
On the Adaptive Brightness setting, you want to toggle the setting to off so that your Windows 10 cannot automatically adjust the brightness.
This is to prevent your screen from dimming when you try to play some games.
Also read: 16 Ways to make your laptop faster for gaming
Disable Night Light Mode and Windows 10 Game Bar
If you are using a dedicated graphics card, especially Nvidia’s graphic card, you might want to disable two settings on your Windows 10 that might disrupt your GPU.
The Night Light Mode and Windows 10 Game Bar, according to Nvidia and some sources, disrupt your dedicated GPU color profiles that might cause your monitor dimming when you play games.
First, to disable the Night Light on your Windows 10, follow this step:
Right-click on your desktop -> Display Settings -> Night Light
Make sure you turn off the Night Light settings in this page.
Secondly, to disable the Windows 10 Game Bar, follow this step:
Windows Settings -> Gaming -> Select Game Bar on the left column
Within this setting, you want to make sure that “Record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar” option is off and “Show Game bar when I play full screen games Microsoft has verified” option is unchecked.
Update Your Drivers, Especially Your Display Driver.
The last thing you can do to stop your screen from dimming is to make sure you have all the latest drivers installed on your Windows 10.
If your drivers are not updated, it might cause your system some problems and reduced performance.
In this case, your outdated driver might be the cause of your screen dimming when you launch an application or games.
So, to update your driver, there are many ways to install the latest driver on your Windows 10.
Firstly, you can use Windows Update feature that is already available in your Windows 10 settings.
To access this feature, go to Settings -> Update and Security -> Windows Update
You can click the check for update button to enable Windows 10 to automatically check your drivers version from the Windows Update.
Secondly, you can also update your Windows 10 drivers using the device manager option.
To access the device manager, go to Start and search for “Device Manager” and then click the top result.
From this windows, you can update your driver manually.
Lastly, you also want to update your GPU drivers.
To update your GPU, you simply visit your GPU manufacturers website and find the latest driver.
After you found the latest driver for your specific GPU model, you just download the file and install the update.
Making sure your Windows 10 driver is up to date not only give you boost in performance, but also let you avoid glitches and error such as screen dims when playing games.
Final Words
To conclude this guide, the dimming problem might happen due to numerous reasons.
Highly possible the problem is the outdated drivers and the mischievous dimming features of windows 10.
You can fix it by updating the drivers and disabling the features.
But you can also make it sure by swapping your monitor with a different one.
So, check all the possibilities beforehand, and hopefully, it will fix the problem.
