For example, if you have an OLED or mini-LED monitor, you really don’t want to be on Windows 10 and miss out on HDR.
And sure, you can say “well nobody has an OLED monitor,” but I’d remind everyone that OLED displays have been pretty much standard on every gaming laptop mid-range and higher for a decent amount of time now.
A lot of the focus for Windows 11 development has been gaming performance and feature improvements. Game developers are also less and less likely over time to bother testing with Windows 10.
Most people just want a computer that does the word, the chrome and that's about it.
PCs have 43% marketshare in the total game console market. Yes, that includes marketshare against the Nintendo Switch.
There’s a bit of a bubble of non-gaming in this forum, but gaming is definitely a top use case for PCs.
Just walk into your local Best Buy in the laptop section and count up how many of the laptops are marketed as gaming systems. That should give you a rough idea of how many systems are purchased with gaming as the primary intent.
Sure, HDR is a niche at this point in time, but technologies like OLED and mini LED are increasingly common. If you buy a gaming laptop in 2026 at most reasonable price points it’s very likely to have an OLED monitor.
Example: Legion 5a Gen 11 AMD, price on Lenovo’s site is $1500, has an OLED monitor. You can buy OLED gaming monitors below $500 nowadays, so a lot of people upgrading have that as their next upgrade path…if not today, then tomorrow.
On that subject, most people just use the copy of Windows that comes with the computer, so the whole debate about Windows 10 is perhaps not worth having in the first place. Microsoft most likely just misjudged the pace of hardware replacement especially in the AI era where computer sales have slowed.
I can plug an OLED display to a fricking Windows XP system with a Maxwell GPU and it'll work perfectly fine as long as it has a goddamn HDMI port. Has nothing to do with OS support.
Yes, the monitor will work but if you want to take full advantage of the panels you enable HDR.
And how much does that cutting edge tech truly matter for the core game experience. I think the steam hardware survey might have some answers there and can tell us for which level of hardware currently developed games are being optimized for.
And that's just the currently developed ones. Not the massive backlog that existed before OLED or microLED HDR screens.
Tiny group. Tiny.
___
Btw, super lame to try to improve your argument after the fact with edits, but, well. Anyway.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
The cutting edge tech does improve the core experience. Quite a lot. You do have to have the money for it, though, and like anything else, diminishing returns on investment.
Steam hardware survey shows Windows 11 gained 2% this month over Windows 10. That’s a significant rate of change.
I recognize that you don’t like my use of edits, however, they are part of this platform and I’m not using them to diss anyone or engage in any kind of negative conversation. Just trying to make my point and support it.
https://www.demandsage.com/most-played-games-right-now/
Some of it is unclear about multi-platform splits and mobile gaming but I don’t think I’m incredibly far off.
Gamers across all platform estimated at over 3 billion: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/number-of-gamers
I actually left Windows to fix driver stability, which worked and did the trick. I couldn’t play Indiana Jones without crashing.
I should have maybe been more clear (grandparent to your comment) that I didn’t mean to be out defending Windows or anything like that. I migrated away from Windows this year.
I just find that the arguments for sticking to Windows 10 are super weak and overstated. Windows 11 is a decent OS and a clear improvement over 10, in my opinion. It’s just that for me, Linux is now better.
My HDR monitor is connected to my Windows 10 machine and the HDR switch in settings is on and my monitor reports it is getting HDR
What am I supposedly missing?
Not that Windows 10 is wildly deficient in these areas, but it has a lot of improvements with display settings and capabilities in general. In my experience with the Windows 11 display settings, it’s an overall big improvement, and I do kind of miss it now that I’m on Linux (e.g., setting up virtual displays with Apollo streaming so that client game stream devices have their own separate display settings per-device was a breeze thanks to the excellent way Windows handles and configures unique sets of attached displays.)
Unlike high refresh rates, 1440p resolution, and variable refresh rates that all were so clearly steps above my previous, 60hz basic HD display that I regretted not being an early adopter, HDR has been an immense letdown.
I can't even tell if it's on or not, even while my monitor and GPU assure me it is. As far as I can tell, the most obvious feature was shabbier looking colors, because they are de-saturated for some reason.
I played with the settings tab shared here[0], but the stupid "Brightness" slider is not obvious at all. Is bright good? Is bright bad? WTF?
That post has some other things to look into though, maybe I need a calibrated color profile? Will that get me colors that actually look better than an SDR display? Who knows.... It doesn't make any sense to me that improved brightness space should somehow result in less saturated colors...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/OLED_Gaming/comments/1h30brf/finall...
I’d have upgraded to it just for the screenshot tool to be honest.
A shinier notepad with builtin AI.
Ads, more ads.
A BSOD that's got 99% more black.
The "recall" spyware.
Mandatory Microslop account.
I could go on, but I use Linux
