If you are facing performance issues during the game, you must know that there are a few things you can do to boost the FPS (apart from buying a new graphic card).
In this post, we’ll show you 5 simple and safe tips to improve the performance of your PC.
Contents
1. Update your graphics card’s drivers
Sometimes, a simple software update is more than enough to achieve a significant improvement in terms of FPS. You just need to download and install the last version of the drivers, that you can easily find on the website of the graphics card manufacturer.
How do I know what drivers should I download?
First, you need to figure out the exact model of your graphics card. To do so, open the Control Panel and change the view to “Big icons”. Then, click on the device manager. You should be able to find the right model within the graphics card section.
How do I find the latest drivers?
You simply need to visit the manufacturer’s website:
- If your graphics card is an NVIDIA, visit the website https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx and find your model within the list.
- If your graphics card is an AMD, vous devez aller sur https://www.amd.com/support. Here you can either choose the model of your card, or you can simply download the automatic detection software. It will run in your computer to detect your hardware and download the latest drivers.
2. Optimize the video settings in the game
Video games usually configure the video settings automatically depending on your Hardware. Nevertheless, some games are excessively optimistic, and the default settings won’t let you play at 60 fps. One solution could be then to adjust those settings to maximize the fps while keeping a good graphic performance.
To do so, we recommend you to start adjusting the following settings. These are usually the most demanding in terms of video resources:
- The antialiasing filter helps to reduce this annoying image deformation. If you completely deactivate this option, you’ll get a significant worse texture quality. Therefore, try first to set this parameter to a low value, such as 2x or 4x and check if your FPS improve.
- The anisotropic filtering improves the sharpness and the quality of those textures rendered at oblique view angles. Try to deactivate this option to gain some additional FPS.
- The V-sync (or vertical synchronization) option ensures that each frame on the screen is displayed exactly at the same time. If you deactivate this option, you might observe some strange phenomena when the image is moving. As you might guess, this is pretty disturbing during gaming. Anyway, you can deactivate this option without any negative impact if you have a screen with a refresh rate higher than the fps you’re trying to reach (for example, 144 Hz screen and 60 fps).
- The screen resolution. Some gamers prefer better graphics at a lower screen resolution, whereas resolution is the most important parameter for their gaming. In any case, reducing the resolution might help you to boost the fps.
3. Overclock the graphics card
Just as it is possible to increase the frequency of the processor, you can also overclock the graphics card to exploit its full potential. Most cards are conservatively limited by the manufacturer to ensure a longer lifespan. It is therefore generally possible to increase its power on the order of 5 or 10% in a stable and safe manner.
To manipulate the settings of the graphics card, you can use the MSI afterburner software. Although MSI is not the brand of your card, the software is compatible with the vast majority of current components and is relatively easy to use.
On the other hand, if you decide to increase the frequency or voltage of the graphics card, be sure to do it in a very smooth and gradual manner, and monitor the temperature at all times. For this you can use software like Everest or GPU-Z.
4. Use Razer Cortex
Razer Cortex is excellent software for maximizing your PC’s performance while gaming. Quite simple, it identifies and stops any other software or processes that are running on your PC that are not needed during the game. In this way, the computer has more resources (at the graphics card and processor level) to run video games at maximum FPS.
5. Clean up your computer
Finally, one last option that might help you would be cleaning your PC. There are several tools that you can take into consideration:
Defragmenting the hard drive
This is a key player in the PC performance when you are using a “traditional” hard drive (HDD). The defragmentation helps you to reallocate the data in the memory in order to minimize the workload when reading these data. Fragmentation is normal and always happen after some time. Therefore, it’s a great idea to regularly perform this kind of procedure to keep your PC in a good shape.
Use a cleaning tool like CCleaner
CCleaner is an excellent tool to identify and delete all those obsolete files (and software) that your computer doesn’t need any more. When you free up some space, you reduce the workload of your PC, which translates directly into an improved performance.
Replace your old HDD by an SSD
Finally, and if you haven’t already done so, buy an SSD drive that is exclusively dedicated to the operating system and software (such as video games). The speed of an SSD multiplies that of traditional hard drives, and if your hardware is at the limit of gaming performance, this small changes could give you more performance.
Bonus for Laptops
Finally, if you’re playing video games on your laptop, make sure the battery mode “high performance” is activated. Otherwise, especially in “battery saving” mode, the laptop will strongly limit the performance to reduce the power consumption.
In order to change these parameters, just click on the battery icon located in the task bar. Then, click on additional settings.
In the new window, make sure that you choose the “high performance” mode.
