Display & graphics tweaks

What this section changes

Display-driver timeout back to the Windows default; window and taskbar animations off. The frame-rate effect has not been measured.

Applying it

1. Open w0a
2. Go to the Regedit Tweaks page in the left menu
3. Find this section and press Apply on the entries you want

Every entry has its own button, so you are not required to apply a whole section — Apply All at the top of the page is there for when you do want all of them.

Undoing it

Two ways, both of which work:

• Backups & Restore — puts back the checkpoint written before the change was applied. It

puts back everything applied after that point, later checkpoints included — the confirmation says exactly that before it starts.

• The Fix page — searched by symptom, writes the Windows default unconditionally. It does not

read a backup, so it works even if w0a's own backup file is gone.

The undo log lives at %ProgramData%\w0a\backup.json, outside your user profile.

The risk

Everything here is a documented value Windows supports; none of it is kernel-level and none of it is irreversible. The honest sentence is still this: a setting may have no measurable benefit for you. If you apply a change and feel no difference, you are probably right — these pages are not selling you a feeling, they are telling you what was changed.

If you want to measure it, the rule from reading the benchmark applies: change one thing at a time, and read the lows rather than the average.

First, the honest sentence

Neither box makes a game run faster, and the frame-rate effect of both has not been measured. The first is a repair: it decides how long a hung graphics card can freeze the whole machine before Windows rescues it, and it puts that back to the Windows default. The second turns off desktop animations; it changes how windows minimize and restore, not how a game renders.

Box by box

Restore the display-driver timeout to the Windows default — deletes TdrDelay and TdrDdiDelay under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers, each only if it is there. No value is the Windows default: 2 seconds for TdrDelay and 5 for TdrDdiDelay, the figures in Microsoft's TDR documentation, which also says end users should not change these keys. The timeout is not how long a frame may take; it is how long Windows waits before rescuing a card that has stopped answering. At two seconds a wedged GPU costs a brief black screen. At the ten seconds older w0a builds wrote, it costs ten seconds of a machine with no picture, no cursor and no input, again on every repeat. The values are deleted rather than set to 2, because absent is the honest way to say "use the Windows default". The box gives one of three answers: restored, already at the default (nothing written), or could not be restored — a key it was refused is reported as a failure, never as "already fine". It asks for a restart only when something was deleted. There is no undo record for it, on purpose: w0a may not write TdrDelay at all, and putting an old value back would be a write.

Turn off window animations — writes MinAnimate="0" (REG_SZ) under HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics and TaskbarAnimations=0 (REG_DWORD) under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced. Windows ships "1" and 1. The reason in the code is that these animations are drawn by the compositor on the same GPU the game uses; what that is worth in a game has not been measured. Both are your own shell preferences, which Explorer reads when it starts, so it takes effect after you sign out and back in, not after a restart.

How to check it yourself

reg query "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers" /v TdrDelay
reg query "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers" /v TdrDdiDelay
reg query "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics" /v MinAnimate
reg query "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced" /v TaskbarAnimations

For the first two, finding no value is the result you want: absent is the default. After the animation box, MinAnimate reads 0 and TaskbarAnimations 0x0.

What this section does not do

It does not raise the display-driver timeout. That was the old box, "raise TdrDelay to 10 s"; it is gone, and TdrDelay is on w0a's banned list — the product refuses to write it anywhere, a restore from a backup included.

It does not write VisualEffects\TaskbarAnimations\DefaultValue. That is only the fallback Windows consults when the live value is missing. An earlier version wrote only the fallback, the taskbar kept animating exactly as before, and the card said otherwise; the live value under Explorer\Advanced is the one written now.

Outside this page

On the Fix page, GPU crash recovery deletes every GPU recovery value, not only these two, and asks for a restart when it removed one; Visual effects turns the animations back on, together with transparency and the other visual-effect settings, and starts the Themes service. Transparency on its own is Disable Windows transparency effects on the Optimizations page. The Stutter Detective reports a TdrDelay of 8 seconds or more that something else wrote and points to this box; if GPU crash recovery is switched off altogether, it points to the Fix card instead.