How to disable adaptive or variable screen brightness in laptops

If you are also frustrated with variable brightness happening over your laptop screen, I might have a solution for you. But you must first know the difference between adaptive brightness based on ambient light and adaptive brightness based on screen content.

What is adaptive brightness based on ambient light?

Many modern laptops have different sensors inbuilt which increase or decrease brightness levels of the device display based on the ambient light. This feature is similar to a smartphone adaptive brightness. The feature, when enabled, works when the lighting conditions are changed in the room you are working in or you are carrying your laptop to another room or outdoors in the sunlight. Thus users don’t have to change screen brightness manually to view screen contents.

Steps to disable adaptive brightness in any laptop

If your laptop has a sensor inbuilt because of which brightness levels are adjusted automatically, you can follow these steps to disable it:

1. Go to Settings 
2. Go to the Display section from the left menu list.
3. Under Brightness and color, look for the Change brightness automatically when lighting changes checkbox. 
4. Deselect the checkbox to disable the automatic brightness feature.

You can also follow below steps to disable the feature:

1. Open Control panel and navigate to Hardware and Sound>Power Options and select Change plan settings for your currently selected power plan.
2. Again select Change advanced power settings 
3. in the Power Options dialog box opened, expand Display> Enable adaptive brightness.
4. Set both On battery and Plugged in modes to Off 
5. Click Ok to save your changes.

What is adaptive brightness based on screen content?

To save device power, this feature increases or decreases the screen brightness level automatically based upon the image contents. For e.g. brightness increase and decrease will happen gradually when the user is switching back and forth to different web pages having a lighter or a darker background. Another example can be seen when the user’s laptop is running a dark theme Windows, but when a Word document is opened, the screen brightness will gradually increase. This automatic adjustment is certainly not pleasing for some people as it causes extra strain on eyes.

If the above feature is driving you crazy, following methods will guide you to disable it:

For an AMD powered laptop

1. Open AMD Radeon Software. If you can’t find AMD Radeon Software, install it from AMD website.
2. Click on Settings icon on the top right corner.
3. Go to Display tab.
4. Disable the Vari-Bright feature by turning off the switch.

For an Intel powered laptop

1. Right click on your desktop.
2. Open Intel HD Graphics settings
3. Click on Power icon to enter device power settings.
4. Disable the feature under Display Power Saving Technology. Repeat this step for all the power plans.
5. Click Apply and save your settings.

Even after following these steps the fluctuation in brightness is not fixed, then you may have to update the display drivers in your system. Follow these steps to update your device display driver:

1. Go to Device Manager 
2. Select Display adapters
3. Select and right click on the display adapter, then select Update driver
4. Follow the instructions

You can also manually download the latest display driver from Intel or AMD website.