Lighting Overview

Open the Lighting section from the sidebar and every RGB device Nexus can drive is already there. There is no import step and no per-brand plugin to install: plug the hardware in, and it appears in the list.

1. How detection works

Nexus finds lighting hardware two ways:

  • First-party drivers that Nexus writes and maintains for specific gear: HYTE panels and cooling alongside hardware from other manufacturers, including RGB fan and lighting hubs, AIO coolers, keyboards, and mice.
  • Broad third-party coverage through a bundled headless build of the open source OpenRGB project, which runs as a separate child process and covers motherboards, RAM, GPUs, and hundreds of other devices.

Detection runs when the service starts and re-scans automatically when USB devices change. You can also force a scan with the Rescan devices button in the Devices header; it is disabled while the OpenRGB subprocess is down. When lighting is off, or while a scan is running, a card at the bottom of the device list says so and carries a dot for the subprocess's state.

See Supported Devices for how to check a specific model before you buy, and Device Not Detected if something you own is missing.

2. Picking a mode

The tabs across the top choose what drives your lighting:

  • Static - one colour per device, placed from a colour picker. See Static Colors.
  • Animation - the shader effects catalog. See Animation.
  • Media - your own images, GIFs, and videos.
  • Mirror - screen sync. See Screen & Audio Sync.

While Animation, Media, or Mirror is running, its tab carries a Pause control that freezes the effect on its current frame until you press Resume.

The chip at the left of the tabs opens the page's own menu, which holds two things: Off, which stops driving RGB so devices fall back to their own lighting, and the switch between Simple mode and Advanced mode. Simple mode is one colour on every device and nothing else - see Simple Lighting Mode. Everything below describes advanced mode, which is where effects, per-device colours, layouts, and the LED map editor live.

At the right of the same row sits the Presets picker, which saves and restores whole canvas layouts, with undo and redo beside it.

3. Two ways a mode drives your devices

The modes split into two families, and knowing which one you are in explains most of what the page does:

  • Static is per device. You select devices in the rail, press a colour, and only those devices change. Each one keeps its own pick, so a build can hold four different colours at once. The canvas becomes the colour picker rather than a preview, and the badge beside Effects tells you how many devices your next press will land on. See Static Colors.
  • Animation, Media and Mirror are whole-canvas. One picture renders across the entire canvas and each device lights up with the part under its own frame, so a single pick drives everything at once and the frames decide who shows what. See Animation.

Off is neither: it stops driving RGB at all.

That split is why the device rail matters more in Static than anywhere else, and why LED Maps & Layouts matters more in Animation.

4. The device rail

The left column lists every device Nexus found, with a count beside the Devices title and Select all / Select none buttons. Each device or zone gets a card with its LED strip, and clicking a card selects it; Cmd or Ctrl click adds to the selection.

Each card's menu holds Identify (flash the device so you know which one it is), LED settings (opens the LED map editor), Turn lights on / off, Turn on / off Nexus Control (whether Nexus drives the device at all), Maximize to full canvas, Minimize, and rotation. With more than one card selected, those entries act on the whole selection and say how many devices they will touch.

Motherboards with more than one ARGB header split into a card per header, grouped under one collapsible parent. Smart lights you have added through the Smart Lights section appear in the same list, grouped by brand.

A few cards carry special states:

  • Detected but not drivable - the device was seen by OpenRGB but its detector failed to initialize it, so Nexus cannot control its lighting.
  • 12V RGB (fixed) - a non-addressable 12V header; it takes a single color and its LED count cannot be set.

5. The preview canvas

The middle column is the preview. Every selected device is drawn as a frame you can drag around, and the badge beside the Effects title says how many devices the preview stands for. One effect renders across the whole canvas, and each device lights up with the part of the picture under its frame, so effects flow across your build. See LED Maps & Layouts.

The canvas carries two buttons of its own: Fullscreen, which opens the running effect full screen, and on audio-reactive effects a Music Reactive toggle.

6. The effect browser

Under the canvas, effects are listed as live thumbnails in collapsible category groups - Flat, Gradients, Two-tone, Spectrum, Organic, Cosmic, Geometric, Pattern, and Audio Reactive. Click one and it applies to your devices immediately. In Static the browser holds the colour picker and the patterns instead.

7. The effect editor

The right column is the dock. Master brightness sits at its top: it caps every device, so a device's effective brightness is the lower of its own brightness and the master value. Under it are the controls for whatever is running - preset slots, the palette ring, and the effect's sliders. The dock collapses out of the way with the button beside its title, and comes back from the button next to Effects.

Tip

If a device flickers or keeps snapping back to another look, a second RGB app is probably fighting Nexus for it. Let one app own each device - see Other RGB & Fan Software.

8. Where effects render

The effects engine renders on your GPU. On systems with more than one GPU you can pick which one under Settings > Lighting & Cooling > Render GPU (changing it restarts Nexus). On a PC with no usable GPU, effect previews still render in the dashboard, but Nexus warns that the effect will not light your devices.

9. Next steps