Obviously, life is better with multiple monitors, and high refresh rate monitors are the best screens. However, constantly running a large number of panels at 240 Hz consumes a lot of power, so Microsoft is introducing a new feature in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25915 that will significantly lower power demand.

This new feature (via Tom's Hardware Fr) will allow Windows 11 to independently promote different refresh rates per screen and dynamically select them based on the content the panel is displaying.

This means that one screen can play games at full refresh rates of 144 Hz, 240 Hz, or 300 Hz, while the other plays video at 30 Hz. In this way, the performance of the main display can be fully exploited while lowering the power demand of the one panel that does not need to run at maximum speed.

A Windows blog post about the new build states: "We have improved the refresh rate logic to allow different refresh rates on different monitors depending on each monitor's refresh rate and the content displayed on the screen. This is to enable gaming and video viewing at the same time. This is most useful for refresh rate-dependent multitasking, such as gaming and video viewing simultaneously."

Living life as a PC gamer while being environmentally conscious can be a challenge. Even with the best will in the world, cramming a 300W graphics card into your system or choosing a high refresh rate monitor just to play a game ranks pretty low from an ecological standpoint. But it is clear that Microsoft is busy working to make sure that Windows 11 handles high-end gaming hardware in a way that will give you the performance you crave.

Admittedly, this is a relatively small thing in the grand scheme of things, but it will only help if Windows 11 helps to completely negate the unnecessary excesses of gaming on our PCs.

Windows 11's power settings already provide energy recommendations, and the Edge browser is also quite efficient.

Interestingly, it was recently revealed that changing the refresh rate also improves the efficiency of AMD graphics cards; ComputerBase has updated its test bench to show that the Radeon RX 7000 series cards, and the Radeon RX 6000 series cards' historically high idle power consumption could be curbed simply by enabling variable refresh rate (VRR).

So if your screen has that feature (whether labeled Adaptive Sync, FreeSync, or G-Sync), enabling it will keep your AMD GPU happily idle. Note that this is AMD-specific; Intel and Nvidia graphics cards are already more comfortably idle by default.

Also, a new feature included in the latest Windows preview builds, especially for mobile crews, is that if dynamic refresh rate (DRR) is selected in the power menu along with battery saver, Windows will stick to a lower refresh rate which means that the battery saver will be turned off. When the battery saver is turned off again, the refresh rate will be restored.

This is the same feature found on some gaming laptops, such as Razer's Blade machines, which allows the user to specify the refresh rate for the gaming panel when running on battery power or at certain battery levels.