How to increase fps and smooth gameplay on your PC

23.04.2024 - 06:35 / digitaltrends.com / Jacob Roach

Modern PC gaming is a true sky-is-the-limit world that never rests. New gaming hardware and accessories (and games!) are being released all the time, but one thing you definitely don’t want to ignore are your drivers and gameplay settings. Believe it or not, one adjustment to something as innocuous-sounding as “frame rate” could make all the difference the next time you fire up Call of Duty.

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What You Need

• A PC

Gaming optimizations aren’t too difficult to understand and make for your PC, and we’ve built this guide to help you tweak this and adjust that.

Update platforms and drivers

It’s amazing how many problems can be solved by making sure everything is updated! If you haven’t tried this in a while, check Windows 11 for any updates by typing “updates” in the search bar and selecting Check for Updates. Likewise, make sure your game is updated if necessary.

You’ll also want to check to see if your GPU needs an updated driver. GPUs receive regular updates to help improve how they use power, fix bugs, and optimize performance for a variety of gaming conditions. These updates can improve fps problems and fix incompatibility issues between your game and graphics card. Nvidia and AMD usually release new drivers alongside major game releases, so it’s worth checking even if you just updated your drivers.

However, GPU drivers don’t automatically update. To check for the latest version of your GPU’s driver, we suggest installing and enabling Nvidia Update or GeForce Experience for Nvidia’s GeForce GPUs. For AMD’s Radeon GPUs, use its Driver auto-detect tool. New problems can come up with old drivers, even if you didn’t experience an issue before. Because of that, it’s important to update your drivers regardless of the issue you’re having.

There are occasions when updating a driver can cause problems rather than solve them. This may happen due to bugs or issues with new driver features being incompatible with how the game is designed. If this happens, either roll back the GPU driver to a previous version or download the original driver all over again — just don’t update, for now.

Outside of Windows and your GPU, check for new BIOS versions for your motherboard. It may seem unrelated to gaming, but your BIOS version may have a big impact on performance. Several years ago, for example, a certain Gigabyte BIOS revision didn’t play nicely with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, causing the game to run at around 10 fps.

Optimize your game's settings

This can be a complex step because games vary in their settings and in what they allow you to tweak. However, you should always pay a visit to the in-game settings menu and see what’s there, especially if the game struggles.

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