How to tweak the settings of the parallax effect on the Windows 8 Start Screen

Whenever you scroll the tiles on the Windows 8 Start screen, you will notice that there is a difference in the speed of the animation of the Tiles and the Start Screen's background. The background scrolls slower than the tiles, giving the user a motion effect of a parallax. Today, I am going to share with you a hidden registry tweak which lets you customize the speed of the parallax effect in few simple steps.

Option one: Use our easy-to-use tool to tweak it
I have updated my Start Screen Animations Tweaker application to version 1.1. It now allows you to customize the hidden settings of the parallax effect.

You can greatly slow down the Start Screen background scroll speed. See this in action in the video below:

Download Start Screen Animations Tweaker

Option two: A manual registry tweak
The parallax effect speed is just one option in the registry. It is located at the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\Accent

You can create the 32-bit DWORD value named "parallax". The value does not exist by default, and Windows 8 considers it equal to 5.

If you set the "parallax" value to zero, the Parallax effect will be disabled, meaning the background will scroll at the same speed as the tiles. The greater the “parallax” value, the slower the background image scroll speed. For example, you can set it to "10" to see a notable difference between the scrolling speed of the tiles and the background image.

You have to log off and log back in to apply the changes. Or you can just restart Explorer via Task Manager.

NOTE: If you want to restore the default speed of the parallax effect, just delete the DWORD value and restart Explorer.

That's it.