RGB lighting has gone from a niche gimmick to, well, it's still a gimmick, but now it's an
incredibly common way to customize your PC. But even though we're just talking about flashing
colored lights, they're surprisingly annoying to control. Look at all these different RGB ecosystems,
each with their own app, and many of them are notoriously buggy and not particularly user-friendly.
And even if you've become an expert in how to use the five different RGB apps you have installed
on your one system, it's undoubtedly inconvenient to have to tweak settings in all of them
whenever you want to change your PC's overall look. Although there have been other attempts
to deal with this problem, such as Signal RGB, Microsoft is trying to integrate its own solution
directly into Windows through a feature called Dynamic Lighting, which popped up in Windows 11
in late 2023. Instead of having separate apps, you can control all of the RGB in your computer
through Windows settings. Although sticking a bunch of RGB LEDs in gaming peripherals has been
pretty popular for around a decade now, the technology took time to grow in terms of both
product offerings and penetrating the market enough to hit the mainstream and not just be a
niche feature for enthusiasts. But now, a good amount of people, including those without high-end
setups, have multiple RGB components, so it makes sense that an easier-to-use, unified solution
is now popping up. Windows is taking these disparate RGB products from different companies
and putting them under the same proverbial roof, using a standard called HID Lamp Array.
So at the heart of Dynamic Lighting is an open standard called HID Lamp Array, which is itself
part of the USB specification. HID Lamp Array provides a variety of options to address each
LED individually, which should allow similar customizability to the various proprietary apps.
And indeed, you can see that Dynamic Lighting provides various effects on its page
in the settings menu. Dynamic Lighting can also respect overrides from other programs on your
computer, notably games that sync with your RGB lights depending on what exactly is happening
during gameplay. To enable this, you just have to tick the slider that says,
Compatible apps in the foreground always control lighting. If it's not working for you,
however, you might have RGB hardware that doesn't support Lamp Array. To use Dynamic Lighting,
RGB devices have to either support it in their firmware or throw a special driver called a VHF
driver. But here's the good news, Microsoft is already working with a good number of RGB device
manufacturers, including Razer, ASUS, HyperX, SteelSeries, HP, Logitech, MSI, ADATA, and NZXT,
to promote broad support for the standard. There are already some laptops, keyboards,
and mice that support Dynamic Lighting, but more products should be following, especially as Dynamic
Lighting is intended to provide benefits for manufacturers as well as users. Instead of having
to write software or proprietary firmware on their own, brands can instead just take advantage of the
Lamp Array standard, leaving them free to instead focus on making the actual hardware better or
more innovative. And let's face it, it's not like they were doing a great job with their own software
to begin with. Ooh, sick bird. Dynamic Lighting also makes it much easier to have all the RGB in
your system sync up in terms of color and effects, even if you've got parts from several different
brands. Unfortunately, hardware manufacturers still use different kinds of LEDs that reproduce
colors differently, so it can't alleviate that annoying effect where white looks yellow on your
fans, but looks purple on your RAM sticks. Here's us crossing our fingers that over time,
greater mixing and matching of RGB parts from different brands, which Dynamic Lighting incentivizes,
pushes manufacturers to make their LEDs look the same as well. Please. Please. Hey, that was a tech
quickie. Thanks for watching. Like the video if you liked it. Dislike it if you dislike it.
Check out this video on the best Windows 11 settings to tweak for gaming.
And comment below with video suggestions. Don't forget to subscribe and follow though.
Gamers, am I right?