Notification disables HDR on full-screen applications

Question

Notification disables HDR on full-screen applications

Ahmet Koçak 5

Notification pop-ups, be it messages or even the volume slider that pops up at the bottom center of the screen, all of them just force the full-screen HDR application (video games primarily) to go black for a second, adjust, show the notification, then go black again, and readjust. By adjust I mean, I believe it goes SDR to show the notification as the colors and brightness change, then goes back to HDR when notification disappears. The problem does not occur when I disable HDR in-game.

It happens with many games, attached you can see what I'm trying to explain. I used Marathon Demo (because it was the latest one) for the screen capture (I couldn't actually do screen capture as that caused the game to launch SDR in the first place):

https://youtu.be/oztuMTot_3U?si=2X_OOda1e5RCFsJ2

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Answer 1

Thomas4-N 10,995 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hello Ahmet Koçak, welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

This is a common behavior where any notification (volume slider, messages, etc.) forces Windows to switch between HDR and SDR modes in fullscreen games, causing the black screen and readjustment you're seeing. It happens because Windows has to break exclusive fullscreen to show the overlay. You can try these two fixes:

Settings > System > Notifications > turn off "Show me notifications when I'm playing a game"
Settings > System > Focus assist > set to "When I'm playing a game"

Let me know if HDR stays stable.

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Ahmet Koçak 5 Reputation points

2026-03-01T12:40:09.1433333+00:00

Hi, thanks for the fixes. I have turned off notifications and put 'Do not disturb' on, so that fixed most of the issue. Only thing remaining (and probably the most annoying) is the volume slider. Any time I want to adjust the volume it's a black screen. I have even tried HideVolumeOSD, which hides the volume slider pop-up, but even when it was hidden, it turned off HDR when adjusting the volume as if the slider was still there. I couldn't figure out what to do with this particular one. There doesn't seem to be any way to completely turn off volume OSD.
Thomas4-N 10,995 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-03-01T12:57:42.77+00:00

Hello Ahmet Koçak, thanks for testing that and sharing what you found.

Unfortunately, what you discovered is the core issue. There's no complete way to turn off the volume OSD system behavior in Windows. Even though HideVolumeOSD hides the visual popup, the underlying audio event still forces Windows to temporarily break exclusive fullscreen and switch your display from HDR to SDR, then back again. It's the same mechanism that caused the notification issues, but volume is harder to work around because it's triggered directly by the audio subsystem.

This is a fundamental limitation of how Windows handles HDR with exclusive fullscreen, not something you can fix with a registry tweak or third-party tool.

Your options at this point are switching to borderless windowed mode in your games (completely avoids the mode switching), or using in-game volume controls instead of Windows volume whenever possible.

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Notification disables HDR on full-screen applications

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