By Walter Jobs, Technology writer and editor · Published 9 October 2026
There is a version of this article on hundreds of sites and most of them share a flaw: the tips are listed as though they are worth roughly the same. They are not. One of them is worth thirty percent, several are worth one or two, and a few are worth nothing at all while being recommended confidently.
So this list is ordered by what each step is actually worth, it starts with measuring rather than changing, and it ends with a section on the advice you should ignore. Fourteen steps, in the order a technician would work through them.
Step 1: Measure before you change anything
Not one of the top-ranking guides for this query tells you to do this, and it determines whether the next thirteen steps apply to you at all.
Turn on an overlay that shows graphics card utilisation, processor utilisation and frame times. The overlay in the NVIDIA app or AMD Adrenalin will do, or MSI Afterburner with RivaTuner, or CapFrameX and PresentMon if you want logs rather than a readout. Then play for two minutes and read it.
| What you see | What it means | Which steps help |
|---|---|---|
| Graphics card at 95 to 99 percent | Graphics-bound. Normal and healthy | Steps 2 to 6 |
| Graphics card below 80 percent, one processor thread near 100 | Processor-bound | Steps 7 to 10. Graphics settings will not help |
| Frame times spiky rather than flat, average looks fine | A frame-time problem, not a frame rate one | Steps 11 to 13 |
| Frame rate drops after a few minutes of play | Thermal throttling | Step 14 |
Our bottleneck calculator will predict which of those four you are in from your two parts, which is a useful sanity check against what the overlay shows you.
If you are graphics-bound: steps 2 to 6
Step 2: Turn on upscaling. Worth 30 to 40 percent.
DLSS, FSR or XeSS at quality mode renders the frame at a lower resolution and reconstructs it. It is the single largest gain available and the visual cost in motion is small enough that most people cannot pick it out. Available on far more hardware than people assume: FSR runs on essentially anything including older NVIDIA cards, XeSS runs broadly, and DLSS covers RTX cards from the 20 series onward, not just the newest generation.
Step 3: Lower the resolution, or the resolution scale. Worth up to 44 percent.
If upscaling is not offered, this is the manual version. 1440p to 1080p removes 44 percent of the pixel work. Resolution scale at 80 percent removes about a third. No quality setting in the menu comes close.
Step 4: Turn ray tracing off. Worth 25 to 50 percent where it was on.
The most expensive single thing in a modern options menu by a wide margin, and the one with the largest gap between its cost and what you notice while moving.
Step 5: Lower the four expensive effects. Worth 15 to 25 percent together.
Volumetric lighting, reflections, ambient occlusion above medium, and shadow quality. Leave textures and anisotropic filtering at maximum; they are nearly free and they do most of the visual work. Which settings cost the most breaks the ordering down properly.
Step 6: Update your graphics driver, with a caveat. Worth 0 to 20 percent.
Large gains are real but specific: they happen on day-one drivers for brand-new games. On a title that has been out six months, expect nothing. The caveat nobody mentions is that regressions happen, so if a game got worse after an update, roll back, and use DDU for a clean removal if a plain rollback misbehaves. “Always install the newest driver” is not quite right.
If you are processor-bound: steps 7 to 10
Step 7: Enable your memory’s XMP or EXPO profile. Worth 5 to 15 percent.
This is the biggest free win on the list and almost no guide covers it. Memory shipped with a rated speed, and unless you switched on its profile in the BIOS it is running at the slow default, often well below what you paid for. A single reboot into BIOS, one toggle, done. Processor-bound games respond strongly to memory speed and latency, so this lands exactly where you need it.
Step 8: Check you are running in dual channel. Worth up to 20 percent if you are not.
One memory stick instead of two halves your memory bandwidth. Open Task Manager, Performance, Memory, and look at the Slots used line. If it says 1 of 2 or 1 of 4, that is your answer, and a second matching stick is the cheapest meaningful upgrade in this entire article.
Step 9: Lower the processor-side settings. Worth 10 to 20 percent.
Draw distance, object and shadow draw distance, crowd and traffic density, physics detail, level of detail transitions. These are the settings that cost processor time, and they are the ones that help when the graphics menu does not.
Step 10: Close what is genuinely using the processor. Worth 0 to 10 percent.
Not “close background apps” as a ritual. Open Task Manager, sort by CPU, and look. A browser with thirty tabs, a Discord stream, recording software or a game launcher running an update are real costs. An idle chat client is not. If nothing is using more than a percent or two, skip this step rather than performing it.
If your frame times are spiky: steps 11 to 13
Step 11: Check your video memory headroom. Worth the whole problem, if it is the cause.
Run short of video memory and the symptom is hitching when you turn or when new areas load, while the average frame rate still looks acceptable. Drop texture quality one step and see whether the graph smooths out. If it does, that was it, and nothing else on this list would have found it.
Step 12: Move the game to a solid state drive.
Streaming from a mechanical drive produces late textures and hitching rather than a lower average. Several publishers now specify NVMe storage for exactly this reason.
Step 13: Cap your frame rate below your refresh rate.
Counter-intuitive and effective. A frame rate that bounces off a V-Sync ceiling produces uneven delivery and added latency; a cap a few frames below the refresh rate, inside your variable refresh window, is smoother than an uncapped rate that keeps hitting the top. If you are on a 144 Hz panel and seeing judder at a capped 60, the refresh division arithmetic explains why.
If it degrades over time: step 14
Step 14: Deal with heat before you deal with anything else.
A frame rate that starts well and falls after five or ten minutes is thermal throttling, and no setting fixes it. Watch processor and graphics card temperatures in the overlay. On a laptop this is the most common cause of poor performance by a wide margin, and the fixes are physical: clear the vents, lift the chassis for airflow, repaste if it is a few years old, and consider an undervolt, which on laptops frequently raises sustained performance because it lets the chip hold a higher clock within the same thermal budget.
What to ignore, and why
This is the section the popular guides are missing, and several of them actively recommend the things in it.
| Common advice | What it is actually worth |
|---|---|
| Optimiser and booster apps, game boosters, RAM cleaners | Nothing for frame rate. Some add their own overhead, and a few are adware. One widely-ranked guide recommends these with affiliate links |
| Defragmenting your drive for FPS | Nothing. Windows handles maintenance automatically, it is irrelevant on an SSD, and it never affected frame rate on a mechanical drive either |
| Registry tweaks: TcpAckFrequency, Win32PrioritySeparation, SystemResponsiveness, disabling Nagle | Nothing measurable on current Windows. Some break networking |
| Disabling Windows services | Nothing, and it is the most common cause of a machine that was working and now is not |
| Game Mode | On by default, and within noise on a desktop. Leave it alone rather than treating it as step one |
| High Performance power plan on a desktop | Around one percent at best, and it can bring thermal throttling forward on a warm machine |
| Temporary file cleaning | Frees disk space. Does not produce frames |
The Windows side of this deserves its own treatment, because some of the genuinely effective changes there carry trade-offs that the guides recommending them never mention: optimising Windows 11 for gaming safely covers what works, what it costs you, and how to undo it.
What each step is worth, side by side
Collected into one place, because the ordering is the actual content of this article and a list of fourteen things hides it.
| Step | Typical gain | Applies when | Cost to you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upscaling at quality mode | 30 to 40% | Graphics-bound | A small softening in motion |
| Lower resolution, 1440p to 1080p | Up to 44% | Graphics-bound | A visibly softer image |
| Ray tracing off | 25 to 50% | It was on | Flatter lighting |
| Dual channel memory, if you are on one stick | Up to 20% | Processor-bound | The price of one memory stick |
| The four expensive effects lowered | 15 to 25% | Graphics-bound | Minor, mostly visible when still |
| Processor-side settings lowered | 10 to 20% | Processor-bound | Pop-in and thinner crowds |
| XMP or EXPO enabled | 5 to 15% | Processor-bound | Free. One BIOS toggle |
| Driver update | 0 to 20% | A brand-new game | Free, with a small regression risk |
| Closing something that is genuinely busy | 0 to 10% | Task Manager shows a real consumer | Free |
| Frame cap below refresh | No average gain, large smoothness gain | Judder or latency rather than low frames | A few frames off the top |
| Game Mode, power plans, booster apps, registry tweaks | 0 to 1% | Never meaningfully | Time, and sometimes a broken machine |
Read the right-hand column before the left one. Half of these gains are conditional on which chip you are waiting for, and applying a graphics-bound fix to a processor-bound machine is the most common wasted evening in PC gaming.
If none of it worked
Then the hardware is the answer, and the useful question is which half. A machine that is graphics-bound at 95 percent utilisation with every setting lowered needs a card. A machine sitting at 60 percent graphics utilisation with a pegged thread needs a chip or faster memory, and a bigger card would change nothing. That is the distinction worth getting right before spending, and it is what the bottleneck calculator exists to answer.