Windows 11's color blindness filters no longer add latency or hurt performance in games

Windows 11's accessibility color filters in the Windows 11 settings.

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has added new colour filter settings to the latest Windows 11 Insider build, which should be of major benefit to PC gamers with colour blindness.

The main hook of the update are two new sliders: an intensity slider for the OS-wide colour filters and a colour boost slider. The intensity slider affects how much a filter impacts colours across your display, while colour boost will change how vivid those colours are. They're sort of two sides to the same coin, but the gist is you'll now be able to have much greater control over the colour filters already in the OS, which include those for deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia, as well as grayscale.

"We have also optimized how Color Filters are applied to the screen by taking advantage of dedicated color matrix hardware on your GPU," Microsoft says. "This allows fullscreen optimizations for games and videos to be used without any added latency or performance impact. Previously, color filters could add an extra frame of latency and prevented some fullscreen optimizations from taking effect. Most modern GPUs have this dedicated hardware and will receive the optimization."

Microsoft doesn't note which graphics cards support the feature, but it likely goes back a few generations at the very least. Nvidia has been offering its own colour filter software called Freestyle with wide support for older non-RTX cards since 2018.

The only downside today is that you need to be on the potentially wobbly Canary brand of Windows 11 to use these new and improved filters. That means signing up for the Insider Program if you haven't already and opting for the riskiest Windows 11 build. These filters will make it into a more stable build of Windows 11 at some point or another, though they were announced over a month ago and I've still not seen them appear in the more stable Beta build.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.