How to boost FPS on a gaming PC: drivers, settings and upscaling that actually help

TUREFF• •0

Low frame rates are rarely fixed by one magic tweak. They come from a handful of things stacking up: an old driver, a few expensive settings, a hot laptop throttling itself, a browser with forty tabs open behind the game. Work through this list in order and you will usually find most of the missing frames before you spend any money.

Start by finding the bottleneck

Turn on a performance overlay (the GPU maker's own app, Steam's built-in counter or the Xbox Game Bar all show FPS and usage). Then look at two numbers while you play:

GPU usage near 95–100%: the graphics card is the limit. Lowering graphics settings or resolution will help.
GPU usage well below that, with one or more CPU cores pinned high: the processor is the limit. Graphics settings will barely matter; settings that affect crowds, physics, draw distance and simulation will.

Knowing which one you are fighting saves hours of changing settings that do nothing.

Update the right drivers

Graphics driver: download it from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel directly rather than relying on Windows Update. New drivers often carry fixes for recently released games.
If a new driver makes things worse, roll back. A clean install option in the installer helps when an old driver is misbehaving.
Update the game itself and its launcher; performance patches are common in the first months after release.

The in-game settings that matter most

Not every slider costs the same. The heavy hitters in most games are:

Resolution: the biggest single lever. Dropping from 4K to 1440p, or 1440p to 1080p, can transform a struggling game.
Shadows: high and ultra shadows are expensive and look only slightly better than medium.
Volumetric fog, clouds and lighting: often surprisingly costly.
Ray tracing: beautiful, and frequently the setting that halves your frame rate. Try the game with it off first.
Screen-space reflections and ambient occlusion: medium is usually the sweet spot.

Settings that usually cost little: texture quality (as long as you have enough video memory), anisotropic filtering and model detail. Keep textures high if your card has the memory for it; it is the cheapest way to make a game look good.

Upscalers: free frames with a small trade

Modern games include upscalers such as DLSS (NVIDIA), FSR (AMD) and XeSS (Intel). They render the game at a lower resolution and rebuild a sharper image, giving a large frame-rate boost for a modest loss in clarity. Quality modes look close to native resolution at 1440p and 4K; performance modes are better kept for 4K or very weak hardware. Which ones you can use depends on your graphics card and the game, so try each on offer. Frame generation, offered by some of these technologies, inserts generated frames between real ones. It makes motion look smoother, but it does not make the game respond faster and can add a little input lag. It works best when you already have a reasonable base frame rate.

Windows settings worth checking

Game Mode: on by default in Windows 10 and 11; leave it on. It prioritises the game over background tasks.
Power plan: on a desktop, choose a balanced or high-performance plan. On a laptop, plug it in: most laptops cut GPU power heavily on battery.
Laptops with two GPUs: make sure the game uses the dedicated card, not the integrated one, in the graphics settings.
Refresh rate: check in Display settings that your 144Hz or 165Hz monitor is actually running at that rate, and that the cable is connected to the graphics card, not the motherboard.

Close what runs in the background

Browsers with video tabs, recording software, RGB lighting apps, cloud sync and some overlays all take CPU time and memory. Close what you do not need while playing and trim the startup list in Task Manager.

Temperatures and dust

A hot CPU or GPU slows itself down to stay safe, so frames drop after a few minutes of play. Watch temperatures in your monitoring tool. If they climb high and fans roar, clean the dust filters and fans with compressed air, check the case has a clear path for air in and out, and lift laptops off soft surfaces. On older machines, fresh thermal paste can make a real difference.

When it is time to upgrade

If you have done all of this and the bottleneck is still the same part, that part is your upgrade:

GPU-limited at your chosen resolution: a graphics card is the upgrade that adds the most frames.
CPU-limited in the games you play: a new processor, which may mean a new motherboard and RAM on older platforms.
Stutters when loading or swapping apps: more RAM (16GB is the comfortable floor for gaming now, 32GB for heavy multitasking) or moving the game to an SSD.

Share your specs, the game and your current frame rate in the comments, and others can suggest which settings to try first.