Windows 11 looks and runs better without transparency or animations—here’s how to disable both

While it may be subtle, Windows 11 is full of lots of little animations and details that give the operating system an overall feeling of shiny and modern. Of course, this is only skin deep, but aside from Windows 11 actually looking shiny and modern under the hood, these aesthetic effects don’t come free.

Animations and transparency require CPU and GPU time, and often something that looks pretty hurts efficiency. If you don’t really care about pure aesthetics, disabling these features can give you real benefits, especially on older PCs.

Windows 11 visual effects can make the operating system worse

It’s not a pretty picture

Before we look at how to turn off each effect, it’s helpful to understand why you should do so in more detail.

Animations introduce tiny delays into every action you perform. One only lasts a few milliseconds, but if you’re doing thousands and thousands of tasks on your computer every day, it adds up. A computer without unnecessary animations looks more vivid, even if it seems less futuristic.

In the video below, you can see the long list of troubleshooting steps that some people have to follow to fix slow Windows animations, while you can simply disable them instead!

To me this is especially evident when using virtual desktops. I use it heavily, and scrolling from one to the other can be like pulling teeth with that long full-screen swipe animation. Even using presentation shortcuts that take you directly to a virtual desktop is extremely slow. This is just one area where Windows animations are a drag; You will find this problem everywhere.

The transparency effect, on the other hand, can make it harder to understand what’s happening at a glance, and as I said earlier, this transparency effect needs processing power to happen in real time.

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How to Disable Transparency Effects in Windows 11

I can’t see clearly now

Of the two processes, the quicker and easier one is to turn off transparency. All you have to do is go to Settings > Personalization > Color and then turn off “Transparency Effects”.

Honestly, the visual impact of disabling Windows 11’s glassy element is negligible. I completely forgot about it after a few minutes and didn’t feel the need to turn it back on.

How to disable animations in Windows 11

Hold on to it

When it comes to disabling animations in Windows 11, things are a little more complicated and you have more decisions to make. It’s not a binary switch. You can choose to turn off certain animations and leave others on.

If you just want to turn everything off, go to Settings > Accessibility > Visual Effects, then turn off “Animation Effects.”

If you want more control and only want to disable animations that actually bother you, the path is slightly more complicated.

Open the Start menu and search for “Advanced system settings”. Once you open it, choose “Settings” under performance, then check or uncheck the animated visual effects you want to keep or disable.

There are presets here, such as “better performance”, but that just turns everything off. I don’t know about you, but I like having a shadow under my mouse pointer.

The Unexpected Benefits of Disabling Both Settings

It almost looks like a new PC

For me, it was quite surprising how snappy Windows looked after turning off all the extraneous animations. It’s not like my computer can’t handle it. It’s a modern 24-core system, animation load doesn’t matter. No, now my computer seems as fast as it is. The animation delay was there for me, not the computer. Now when I call up a window or switch virtual desktops, it happens in less than the blink of an eye. How I love it!

Despite all the eye candy that’s been disabled, you’d think Windows would look like an eyesore, but it’s not like it’s suddenly Windows 95 again. Honestly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Windows, without transparency or animation everywhere, still looks like a modern operating system to me.