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When we first began giving advice on tweaking your graphics card performance, it was a rough time for PC gamers. The rise of cryptocurrency collided with the pandemic, making it almost impossible to buy PC hardware at reasonable prices. AMD and Nvidia were selling every single card they made to bot farms, which scalpers sold at ridiculous prices, like $1,700 for an RTX 3080. It made sense to stay put with what you had.
Here in late 2024, the pandemic is pretty much over with, and crypto has gone the way of NFTs and the metaverse, so we can finally buy GPUs once again. There’s only one problem: next-generation GPUs are expensive. Sure, high-end gear has always cost a pretty penny, but cards from AMD and Nvidia in recent years have cranked things up a notch, and that’s especially true for Nvidia, but don’t get us started. This has seemingly caused a lot of gamers to take a pass on this generation of GPUs, opting instead to just stick with what they have for now. If you’re in this camp, you want to squeeze every last drop out of your existing hardware. If that’s you, this guide should be right up your alley.
Before we kick off, a few caveats are in order. First, the tweaks we’ll explore, even taken in aggregate, will certainly help but are unlikely to work miracles. Performance tuning can improve frame rates and turn a game chugging in places into one that runs noticeably and meaningfully better, but there’s no way to turn an RTX 2060 into an RTX 4080 Super. Second, because every game is different, some of these tips may be more or less effective, depending on the title.
Three miscellaneous tips before we start: First, check if you’re running in windowed or fullscreen mode. If you’re in windowed mode, try switching to fullscreen to see if performance improves. Windowed modes are sometimes slower than fullscreen because the GPU keeps drawing the desktop behind the game even when you can’t see it. With Windows 11, some games now only offer a borderless fullscreen mode. Not every game shows a performance advantage for fullscreen versus borderless/windowed, but always check this setting if you’re trying to maximize performance.
Second, ensure you’ve cleared out any dust from your GPU and CPU. While unlikely to be a major slowdown cause, a GPU will throttle back its performance if it’s overheating. Dust is an excellent insulator, and older cards have no performance to spare in the first place.
This resolution scale shows the difference between popular resolutions. We’re not quite at 8K for gaming just yet, but we’ll get there some day!
Credit: Adobe
Third: When in doubt, try a lower resolution. 4K is 2.25x more pixels than 1440p. 1440p is 1.7xx more than 1080p. 1080p is 2.25x more than 720p. While reducing detail settings will also help improve frame rates, cutting your output resolution will reduce pressure on both VRAM and the GPU core itself by giving it less work to do per frame. This is especially true if you are using an APU or other integrated graphics solution.
This article aims to help you improve game frame rates without completely sacrificing quality. There are going to be trade-offs throughout this process. You may find that you like some solutions more than others, or that some harm image quality much more than you recover in terms of performance. The guide is written generally because the knobs and dials vary from game to game, but it should be possible to improve performance in any game, at least a little.
Game-Specific Optimization
The first thing we recommend doing to squeeze a little performance out of an aging card is to experiment with game settings themselves. While most reviewers test titles according to presets (Low, Medium, High, etc.), this is a practical, time-saving necessity, not a guide to achieving the best possible performance on a given card.
Gamers generally know that certain features explicitly tied to AMD or Nvidia GPUs (think GameWorks) can incur heavy performance penalties on other architectures. Still, the same can be true for other features as well. It’s not unusual for a game’s implementation of ambient occlusion, tessellation, or antialiasing to hit one company’s GPU harder than another, and this can vary depending on the GPU family. Yes, simply lowering game settings or resolution can improve frame rate, but toggling specific features can get you nearly the same results for a smaller reduction in performance.
Different games handle visual quality reductions differently. In some titles, Medium is only a modest reduction in quality from Ultra or High. Sometimes the benefits of a Very High or Ultra detail setting are quite small relative to their performance hit.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077 offer a veritable buffet of menu options to allow anyone to enjoy decent frame rates if they’re willing to fiddle with their settings a bit.
Credit: CD Projekt
Don’t be afraid to climb into the Advanced Options and start changing various sliders. Because different GPUs take different performance hits from different options, you may need to do a little detective work, but it’s not unusual to boost frame rates by 5-10% just from minor tweaks.
It’s a good idea to use presets as rough targets. If you know a game runs acceptably fast on Low and too slowly on Medium, don’t be afraid to use Low as a starting point for tweaking features upwards. You may find there’s more eye candy available to you than you initially thought. Treat the situation like a buffet dinner — if you don’t see much difference between Medium and High textures in a title, check to see if dropping to Medium gives you enough headroom to turn up a setting you do care about. You may find that expensive features add relatively little to the game, giving you space to enable other visual improvements you want.
Running at a lower resolution is also a useful way to spot-check performance improvements, though this is title-specific. First-person shooters tend to scale better with resolution changes than a game like Civilization VI.
Some games offer a “Render Scale” option that ranges from, say, 0.25x – 2x. This refers to the base resolution of the game before it’s resized and is analogous to setting a lower resolution. A 1080p game at 50% render scale is rendered at 960×540, then resized, for example.
While this option is not always available, gamers may find it produces different results than manipulating the base resolution through Radeon Image Sharpening or Nvidia’s Image Sharpening feature.
Driver Tweaks
Once upon a time (the late 1990s), it wasn’t uncommon for AMD and Nvidia to drop drivers that would improve game performance by 10-20%, even in older titles. Those days are mostly gone, provided you aren’t installing a launch-day update for a new game. But there are still a few ways you can tweak driver panel settings to squeeze out a little more performance.
Nvidia and AMD have both implemented scaling options you can tap to improve overall quality on newer cards. AMD has Radeon Image Sharpening, and Nvidia has its own Image Sharpening option, shown below.
The Nvidia control panel lets you apply settings globally on let the game’s settings dictate things.
Credit: Nvidia
The point of enabling features like Image Sharpening is that you can set a lower base resolution and depend on the post-processing filter to improve image quality. The goal is to deliver something closer to 1080p visuals without actually taking the penalty from rendering at that resolution. Exactly how well this capability works will vary game-by-game for AMD and Nvidia.
Texture Filtering
On Nvidia cards (AMD has an analogous option in its own driver settings), you can also set texture filter quality to “High Performance” as opposed to the default “Quality” option, force Ambient Occlusion on or off (if applicable), and force anisotropic texture filtering off. Check the visual impact of these options before assuming you’ll like the result; the impact of disabling anisotropic filtering is probably higher than the performance you’ll get back is worth.
Credit: Nvidia
Tweaking image quality in-driver won’t gain you a ton of performance, but it should improve things by a few percent. It’s also useful to check, to make sure you haven’t used global settings for one title and then forgotten to change them for another.
Enable DLSS / FSR
While Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) are fairly new to the scene but are quickly becoming mandatory on demanding AAA titles where every GPU struggles a bit. Our advice is to try enabling either feature if it’s available in the title you want to optimize. DLSS and FSR render a game at a lower resolution and then use temporal sharpening (AMD) or an AI-powered upscaling network (Nvidia) to improve final image quality. This can improve performance at a given resolution target, though there is typically at least a small impact on image quality.
Nvidia’s DLSS 3 is now up to version 3, with AMD slightly behind with its latest version being FSR 2. Both produce surprisingly good image quality that you have to pixel-peek on to really notice small differences between the different modes (balanced, quality, performance, etc). This technology works very well, and if you’re not getting the frame rate you want, you should enable it immediately and see how it runs on your system.
Check for Online Tweaks, Unofficial Patches, and Unexposed Settings
This one, again, is highly game-dependent. Some games don’t support modding or have small user communities. But in some cases, end-users take it upon themselves to create patches that fix various aspects of a title, including issues that impact performance. Some games receive unofficial patches that can boost performance or optimize game textures for systems with low RAM.
Don’t be afraid to crawl underneath the hood of a game. Check inside the configuration files themselves to see what might be tunable. In some cases, you may find there are options the game developer has not exposed in-menu, or that the game supports a wider range of settings than the menu shows.
Sometimes, it’s possible to reduce further or disable particle effects, draw distances, shadows, or other detail settings by editing the game settings file by hand rather than relying only on in-game menus. Always keep a backup of any settings file you edit in this manner so you can restore it if you make a mistake.
Overclock Your GPU (Desktop Only)
We’re only touching on the topic here, not diving into it, but overclocking your GPU is typically good for a few percentage points of performance, at the very least. Again, your results will vary based on which card you have and how aggressively the manufacturer tuned it beforehand. Tools like MSI Afterburner can be used to overclock most GPUs.
What might you get as a result? A few percent would be a reasonable expectation depending on the card.
Note: Everything written here applies to desktop GPUs. ExtremeTech does not recommend attempting to overclock a laptop GPU.
MSI Afterburner is the tool of choice for GPU overclocking as it works with any GPU and is easy to use.
Credit: MSI
If you plan to test a GPU overclock, we recommend small tweaks (no more than a 5% increase to memory or GPU clock at any one time) and slow going. Stay away from adjusting your GPU’s voltage until you’ve researched the topic and the acceptable range of your card, and don’t tell Afterburner to automatically apply settings at boot until you’ve confirmed the settings you want.
Expect this process to lead to a lot of reboots and lockups if your goal is to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your card — you’ll have to do some testing to find out where the right breakpoints are. It’s entirely possible to have 10 games that run rock-solid on a GPU at one clock but an 11th title that won’t run at anything but stock speeds. Such is the nature of this metaphorical beast.
If you aren’t overclocking by pushing voltages higher, the chances of damaging the card are fairly small, though we recommend you make sure the fans are dusted before you start pushing things. Most GPUs can typically handle a 5-10% overclock without complaint.
Enable FreeSync/G-Sync
This is a fringe idea because most gamers with a FreeSync or G-Sync display probably also have relatively new GPUs. Still, if you find yourself in a situation where you have a monitor that supports these capabilities hooked to a less-powerful GPU, you should try enabling the feature and seeing if it helps your subjective experience. FreeSync and G-Sync are technologies from AMD and Nvidia that improve frame rate smoothness by synchronizing the display’s refresh rate with the GPU’s frame presentation. They make the greatest difference at low frame rates, where a lower-end GPU is likely to spend most of its time.
If your display and GPU support these technologies and you’re struggling with a 30-40fps frame rate, try turning them on. You may find it improves your gaming experience without boosting your frame rate.
Adding It All Up
None of these solutions will work if you’re trying to coax more life out of a 10-year-old card, but they can measurably improve your overall performance. If you can tweak game settings for a 7% boost, pick up a 7% overclock, and tweak driver settings for a further 3%, you’ve got a 17% overall performance improvement. In a game struggling to hit 30fps (let’s call it 28fps for fun), a 1.17x improvement gets you up to 33fps. That’s not a ton, no — but the corresponding impact of each additional FPS is larger the lower your frame rate is. The perceived difference between 28 and 33fps is much larger than the gap between 60 and 65fps, even though both are 5fps faster than the other.
And of course, these are conservative estimates. In certain titles, particularly if unofficial performance-enhancing patches are available, you might see significantly larger gains, especially if you’re already bumping up against the VRAM limit of your current GPU. Resolution cuts can help a lot in this case — don’t be afraid to drop to lower resolutions if you’re seeing heavy stuttering, especially if you have an older or lower-end card with a limited amount of memory.
It’s also sometimes possible to write unofficial config files that make a game playable by lowering detail levels below what the developer intended. We had several WoW-playing friends whose graphics we “detuned” in this fashion, allowing them to raid on laptops that otherwise couldn’t handle the job. This was years ago, so I don’t know if the same hooks are still in the game, but there can be real value in this kind of optimization.