How To Increase FPS – Top 10 Methods

Every gamer knows that heart-sinking moment: your FPS counter dropping into the red during the most crucial moments. Whether you’re exploring Palworld, raiding in WoW, or clutching in Valorant, frame drops kill performance. And in today’s gaming scene, even a split second of lag can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

But here’s the good news: You don’t need to shell out hundreds on a new GPU to fix it. Here are 10 simple yet effective methods that have helped thousands of gamers transform their performance, and most of them won’t cost you a dime…

10 effective methods to increase FPS

You may not have to try them all; just work from the top down the list until you see a significant FPS boost:

1. Defrag your main hard drive
2. Change the power option and adjust for best performance
3. Update your graphics driver
4. Lower your screen resolution
5. Do a disk clean-up
6. Close other apps and disable startup items
7. Get hardware upgrades
8. Enable Game Mode in Windows
9. Use NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR
10. Optimize Windows Visual Effects

Tip 1: Defrag your main hard drive

As we constantly add and remove files on our hard drives, small packets of information can end up in random places. This may result in our computer having to check multiple places for those pieces, hence the longer file opening/loading time, boot-up time etc. So we might have to defrag our hard drive to solve this and give our computer performance a boost. Here’s how: 

1. On your keyboard, press the Windows logo key and E at the same time, then click This PC.
   
2. Right-click on Local Disk and click Properties.
   
3. Click the Tools tab > Optimize.
   
4. Click Optimize.
   
5. Once the process finishes, please restart your computer for the changes to take effect.
6. Check to if the low FPS issue has been resolved. If yes, then great! If the issue remains, please try Tip 2, below.

Tip 2: Change the power option and adjust for best performance

By default, the power plan on our computer is often configured to Balanced or Power saver to conserve battery, which largely compromises the operating capacity of your graphics card and CPU. Also the system performance on our computer may also be undermined for the advanced graphics features.

Here is how to change the settings:

1. On your keyboard, press the Windows logo key and R at the same time, then copy & paste powercfg.cpl into the box and press Enter.
   
2. Choose the High performance option.
   
3. In the top-right corner of the window, type advanced and click View advanced system settings. 
   
4.  In Advanced, click Settings.
   
5. Click Adjust for best performance > Apply > OK.
   

Tip 3: Update your graphics driver

Your graphics driver is the bridge between your GPU and your games. If it’s outdated or incompatible, that bridge starts to crack, leading to lower FPS, stuttering, or even crashes. Keeping your drivers updated is one of the quickest and most reliable ways to unlock your system’s full performance potential.

If you don’t have the time, patience or computer skills to update your drivers manually, you can, instead, do it automatically with Driver Easy. 

Driver Easy will automatically recognize your system and find the correct drivers for it. You don’t need to know exactly what system your computer is running, you don’t need to risk downloading and installing the wrong driver, and you don’t need to worry about making a mistake when installing. Driver Easy handles it all.

You can update your drivers automatically with either the 7 days free trial or the Pro version of Driver Easy. It takes just 2 clicks, and you get full support and a 30-day money-back guarantee with the Pro version:

1. Download and install Driver Easy.
2. Run Driver Easy and click the Scan Now button. Driver Easy will then scan your computer and detect any problem drivers.
   
3. Click the Activate & Update button next to the flagged device to automatically download and install the correct version of this driver.
   
   Or click Update All to automatically download and install the correct version of all the drivers that are missing or out of date on your system (You’ll need the Pro version for this – when you select Update All, you’ll get a prompt to upgrade. If you’re not prepared to purchase the Pro version yet, Driver Easy provides a 7-day trial at no cost, granting access to all Pro features like fast downloads and easy installation. No charges will occur until after your 7-day trial period ends.)
   
4. After updating, restart your computer to take effect.

Tip 4: Lower your screen resolution

Another method you can try is to lower your screen resolution. Here’s how:

1. Right-click on the empty area of your desktop and click Display settings.
   

   

2. In Resolution, click the drop-down menu to reduce resolution (to 800 x 600 for example).
   

   

Tip 5: Do a disk clean-up

Disk Clean-up is a built-in tool in Windows that helps us delete unimportant and junk files. To run Disk Clean-up:

1. On your keyboard, press the Windows logo key and R at the same time. Then copy & paste c:\windows\SYSTEM32\cleanmgr.exe /cDrive into the box and click OK.
   
2. Choose the drive you want to free up storage and click OK.
   
3. Technically, you can tick all the boxes. You might also need to check out Recycle Bin and see if there’s anything to be restored first. Then click OK.
   
4.  Make sure the ticked files are the ones you no longer want and click Delete Files to confirm.
   

Tip 6: Close other apps and disable startup items

Some apps (regardless of running in the background or not) can be quite resource-hungry and eat up a lot of our CPU usage, causing FPS to jump. Same with the startup items. So we might need to close these apps while we’re not using them and disable those startup programs:

1. On your keyboard, press Ctrl, Shift and Esc at the same time to open Task Manager.
2. Right-click on the programs you don’t need to run at the moment (including those background apps) and click End task.
   
3. Click the Startup tab, right-click on the items that start themselves during a computer boot and click Disable.
   

Tip 7: Get hardware upgrades

If none of the above software-related changes help to increase your FPS, it’s possible that you need to upgrade your hardware components. Here are some places to look at:

RAM sticks

Windows asks more and more from your RAM resources to run smoothly. If you have just 4 GB or lower RAM, it’s even a challenge for Windows 10 and Windows 11 to run smoothly without any lagging or freezing, let alone resource-hungry programs like games.

So to get your computer moving, one of the fastest ways is to upgrade your RAM, at least up to 8 GB. 16GB or 32GB is more even favorable. Before you make an investment, make sure that your computer can fully use all the RAM sticks you’re about to add, since some devices have a number cap. Always check your computer’s manual to find that out.

Graphics card

The newer the games, the more they ask for your graphics card. So if you feel that your display card starts to age, as most games start to have the low FPS problem, it’s time for you to replace your graphics card with a more advanced one.

If your graphics card comes with your processor, you may need to consider a CPU upgrade instead.

Use an SSD

Installing the game files on an SSD instead of an HDD is usually helpful when your games lag or freeze easily. Even though this doesn’t improve the FPS directly, it’s usually an obvious improvement to the overall gaming performance.

Tip 8: Enable Game Mode in Windows

Windows Game Mode helps optimize your PC for gaming by preventing background processes from interrupting your gameplay. Here’s how to enable it:

1. On your keyboard, press the Windows logo key and I to open Settings.
2. Click on Gaming > Game Mode.
   
3. Toggle Game Mode to On.
   

After enabling Game Mode, you should notice improved gaming performance as Windows prioritizes your game’s resources over background tasks.

Tip 9: Use NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR

If your graphics card supports it, enabling NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) or AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) can significantly boost your FPS with minimal impact on visual quality. To enable this, simply launch your game. Then go to Graphics or Display settings, locate DLSS or FSR options and select “Performance” or “Balanced” mode for the best FPS boost.

This technology uses AI upscaling to render games at a lower resolution and then upscale them, giving you much better performance without sacrificing much visual quality.

Tip 10: Optimize Windows visual Effects

Windows uses various visual effects that can impact gaming performance. Here’s how to optimize them:

1. On your keyboard, press the Windows logo key and the R key.
2. In the command window, type sysdm.cpl and press Enter.
   
3. Choose the Advanced tab. Then, in the Performance section, click Settings….
   
4. Select the Adjust for best performance option. Then click Apply > OK.
   

This will disable unnecessary visual effects and animations in Windows, freeing up resources for your games. You should notice an immediate improvement in gaming performance, especially on lower-end systems.

There you go – 10 useful tips to help you increase your FPS for your better gaming experience. Hope this helps and feel free to comment below if you have any further questions. 🙂

Featured image by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

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