By Walter Jobs, Technology writer and editor · Published 9 October 2026
The guides to this all share a shape: a numbered list of toggles, no measurements, and no mention of what any of them costs you. Two of the most commonly recommended changes weaken kernel-level security, one of them can lock you out of competitive games entirely, and none of the pages recommending them says so.
So this is the same subject handled differently. Every change below is marked with what it is realistically worth, what it costs, and how to put it back. The word “safely” in the title is doing work.
The honest summary, before the detail
Windows tweaking is the lowest-yield category of performance work. Almost everything here is worth between zero and a few percent, and the two changes capable of more than that are the two that give something up. If you came here because a game is running badly, the frame rate checklist has the steps that are worth double digits; this page is for squeezing the last few out, and for undoing damage done by an “optimisation” video.
| Change | Realistic gain | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Memory Integrity off | 0 to 5%, largest on older processors | A real reduction in kernel exploit protection |
| Virtual Machine Platform off | 0 to 3% | Breaks WSL2, Docker Desktop, Hyper-V, Sandbox. Can break anti-cheat |
| Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling | 0 to 2%, either direction | Nothing, but it can regress. Test it rather than assuming |
| Per-game GPU preference on a laptop | Can be large on a dual-GPU laptop, nothing on a desktop | Nothing |
| Startup app trimming | 0 to 8%, only if something was genuinely busy | Nothing, if you check first |
| Power mode to Best Performance | 0 to 1% on a desktop, more on a laptop on battery | Heat, fan noise, battery. Can bring throttling forward |
| Game Mode | Within noise | Nothing. It is already on |
| Fullscreen rather than borderless | 0 to 3%, plus a latency improvement | Slower alt-tabbing |
| Registry tweaks, service disabling, debloat scripts | 0% | A machine that needs reinstalling |
The anti-cheat problem nobody mentions
This is the most important paragraph on the page and it appears on none of the guides currently ranking for this subject.
The top recommendation in almost every Windows optimisation article is to switch off Memory Integrity and the Virtual Machine Platform. Several competitive games either require or interact with the same platform security features those settings sit on top of: Secure Boot, TPM 2.0 and virtualisation-based security. Disabling them to chase two percent can mean a game refuses to launch, or an anti-cheat flags the machine, and the error message you get will not mention the setting you changed last week.
If you play anything with a kernel-level anti-cheat, leave both of those alone. The performance you are buying is small, the inconvenience is not, and the diagnosis path when it goes wrong is miserable.
The changes worth making
Check what is actually running at startup, rather than trimming by reflex
Open Task Manager, go to the Startup apps tab, and then, in the part the guides skip, go to the Processes tab, sort by CPU, and look at what is genuinely consuming time while the machine is idle. Disable the things that are busy. A manufacturer updater polling every ten minutes, a cloud sync client indexing, overlay software from a peripheral vendor: those are real. An idle chat client sitting at nought percent is not costing you frames, and disabling it is theatre.
To undo: the same tab, set back to Enabled.
Set the GPU preference per game, if you are on a laptop
Settings, System, Display, Graphics, then add the game’s executable and choose High performance. On a laptop with both integrated and discrete graphics this occasionally fixes a case where the game was running on the wrong one, which is worth far more than a few percent. On a desktop with a single card it does nothing at all.
Test hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling rather than enabling it on faith
Settings, System, Display, Graphics, Change default graphics settings. It changes who manages the GPU’s work queue. On some systems it helps slightly, on others it costs slightly, and it is required by some frame generation implementations. Measure it with it on and off in the game you care about; do not take anybody’s word for which way it goes on your hardware.
Run fullscreen rather than borderless windowed
Exclusive fullscreen gives the game direct control of the display and avoids the desktop compositor. The gain is small and the latency improvement is more consistent than the frame rate one. Windows 11 also has an “Optimizations for windowed games” toggle in the same Graphics settings page, which reduces the penalty for borderless if you need to alt-tab constantly, and it is absent from every guide I checked.
Leave Game Mode on and stop thinking about it
It is enabled by default, it suppresses some background activity and notifications, and on a desktop its effect on frame rate is within measurement noise. The guides that make it step one are padding. It does no harm; it simply is not the lever they imply.
Power mode: the nuance
On a desktop, Best Performance is worth approximately nothing, and on a machine that already runs warm it can bring thermal throttling forward by keeping clocks up during moments the chip would otherwise have cooled. On a laptop, especially on battery, the difference is real and large. Set it to Best Performance on a laptop while plugged in and gaming; on a desktop, leave Balanced alone.
The two changes with a real cost
Memory Integrity
Windows Security, Device security, Core isolation. It uses virtualisation to stop untrusted code running in the kernel. The performance cost is genuine but modest, and it is highly processor-dependent: it is largest on older chips that lack the hardware mode-based execution control that makes it cheap, and close to free on recent ones. So the benefit of switching it off is inversely related to how new your machine is.
What you give up is one of the stronger protections against driver-level exploits. If you are on a current processor, the honest advice is to leave it on because the gain is near zero. On an older machine there is a trade to consider, and it is a security trade rather than a free win.
To undo: same screen, switch back on, reboot.
Virtual Machine Platform
Control Panel, Programs, Turn Windows features on or off. Switching it off removes the virtualisation layer entirely, which also disables Memory Integrity as a side effect.
It breaks WSL2, Docker Desktop, Hyper-V, Windows Sandbox and Android app support. If you develop anything, you will notice within a day. Combined with the anti-cheat issue above, this is the change most likely to cost you more than it returns.
To undo: same screen, tick it, reboot.
What does nothing, and what breaks things
The pages ranking for this query mostly do not recommend these, but they do not warn against them either, and the advice is everywhere on video platforms.
Registry tweaks. TcpAckFrequency, Win32PrioritySeparation, SystemResponsiveness, NetworkThrottlingIndex, disabling Nagle’s algorithm. These are repeated endlessly and none of them produces a measurable frame rate change on current Windows. Several of the network ones are genuinely counterproductive on modern connections. The values were occasionally relevant fifteen years ago on a different kernel.
Disabling Windows services. No measurable frame rate gain, and it is the single most common reason a machine that worked yesterday has broken audio, no Windows Update or a disabled Defender today. Services are not idling on your processor; they are waiting on events.
Debloat scripts and custom “gaming” Windows builds. They disable things in bulk without telling you which, they break Windows Update in ways that surface months later, and the performance claim is unmeasured. A modified ISO from an unknown source is also a supply-chain question you should not answer casually.
Booster and optimiser applications. RAM cleaners, game boosters, one-click optimisers. They do nothing for frame rate, some add overhead of their own, and a few are adware. If you already installed one, removing it is the optimisation.
Enabling hidden features with ViVeTool. One widely-ranked guide walks readers through enabling an under-development Windows feature by its internal ID. It may be removed or changed in any update, and when it breaks there will be no documentation for what you did.
Driver updates, done properly
Use the NVIDIA app or AMD Adrenalin rather than hunting for installers; GeForce Experience, which some guides still name, has been superseded. Large gains come from day-one drivers for brand-new titles and essentially nothing on older games. Regressions happen, so if a game became worse after a driver update, roll it back, and use DDU for a clean removal if the rollback misbehaves.
A clean undo list
If you followed an optimisation video and things got worse, this is the order to reverse it in. None of the guides recommending these changes provides this.
- Uninstall any booster or optimiser software.
- Re-enable Memory Integrity: Windows Security, Device security, Core isolation. Reboot.
- Re-enable Virtual Machine Platform: Turn Windows features on or off. Reboot.
- Set every Windows service you changed back to its default startup type. If you do not have a record of what you changed,
sfc /scannowfollowed byDISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealthis the next step, and a reinstall is the one after that. - Undo registry edits. If you did not export the keys first, this is the step that argues for not doing registry edits.
- Re-enable Secure Boot in BIOS if a guide had you turn it off, particularly if a competitive game has stopped launching.
- Power mode back to Balanced on a desktop.
Then measure, and if the frame rate is still not where it should be, the problem was never Windows. Find out which of your two parts is the limit with the bottleneck calculator and work from there.