How to Improve FPS in PC Games: A No-Nonsense Guide

Every year the search volume for this question climbs, and every year the advice online gets a little more diluted. The realistic PC-tuning steps that meaningfully improve game frame rate — ordered by impact.

The topic looks simple on the surface, but the trade-offs beneath it are what separate a smooth outcome from an expensive one. That’s why we put together this guide on “how to improve fps in pc games: a no-nonsense guide” — to give you the version we wish we’d had when we first worked through it ourselves.

Whether you’re doing this for the first time or looking to sharpen an existing setup, the same principles apply. We’ve flagged the beginner-friendly and expert-only bits along the way. We’ll start with the essentials, work through the concrete steps, cover the mistakes people trip on most often, and finish with the questions we get asked whenever we publish something in this area.

Key takeaways

If you only take five things away from this article:

Update the GPU driver first — one of the parts you’ll want to pay closest attention to as you work through this guide.
Turn down two settings that matter, leave the rest — one of the parts you’ll want to pay closest attention to as you work through this guide.
Enable DLSS or FSR — but not both — one of the parts you’ll want to pay closest attention to as you work through this guide.
Cap your frame rate — one of the parts you’ll want to pay closest attention to as you work through this guide.
The order of the sections matters — later steps often assume earlier ones are done.
The mistakes section near the end is worth reading first if you’ve already tried the basics without success.

Why this matters in gaming today

The gaming landscape moves fast, and the advice you’ll find in older articles frequently no longer applies. We keep this guide current because the underlying question — captured neatly by the title, “How to Improve FPS in PC Games: A No-Nonsense Guide” — is one people search for month after month, and the correct answer keeps quietly shifting as tools, products, and best practices evolve.

The good news is that once you’ve read this through, you’ll have a mental model that adapts even when a specific version or product changes. Concrete steps are useful, and we’ll give you plenty of them; but the framing behind those steps is what actually lasts. That’s the framing we’ve tried to build into every section of this guide.

We’ve also been careful to flag where the advice depends on your specific situation — the setup you already have, the budget you’re working with, the trade-offs you personally care about most. There is very little “one right answer” in gaming; there are many good answers, and the goal here is to help you find the one that fits you.

Update the GPU driver first

The single highest-return performance tweak available. New Nvidia and AMD drivers routinely add 5–20% in specific titles.

The nuance here matters more than most guides let on, so it’s worth reading twice if the topic is new to you. There’s a version of this that looks the same but works very differently in practice — the details below draw the line.

In practical terms, that means the difference between a five-minute solution and a two-hour detour usually comes down to which of the details above you attend to. It sounds like a small distinction, and on paper it is; in daily use it turns out to be exactly the thing that separates a setup you enjoy from one that quietly gets in your way.

In our experience, readers who work through this section carefully rarely have to come back to it — the setup holds up over time, survives updates, and continues to make sense even as the surrounding tools evolve. That’s the standard worth aiming for.

Turn down two settings that matter, leave the rest

Shadows and volumetrics are the biggest FPS hogs in modern engines. Drop them from Ultra to High and you’ll gain 20–40% with barely a visual difference.

Getting this piece right up front is one of those decisions that pays dividends every time you use the setup after. A few minutes of thought here compounds into hours of saved friction over the course of a year.

It’s tempting to over-engineer at this stage. Resist. Get the simple version working first; you can always iterate later, and most people never need to. Complexity added “just in case” is complexity you’ll have to maintain forever for the case that never came.

One tell-tale sign you’ve done this right: a month later, you can’t remember exactly what you changed, because everything just works. If you’re still tweaking the same setting three weeks in, revisit the decision from scratch.

Enable DLSS or FSR — but not both

Modern upscalers get you 30–60% more frames for very little quality loss. Use whichever is native to your GPU.

This is the part of the process where a little care compounds into a much smoother experience later. Give it the attention it deserves now and the rest of the guide will feel like it’s flowing downhill.

If you take nothing else from this section, take the framing: the effort here is small, and the payoff shows up every time you use the setup afterwards. Investments that repay themselves daily are the kind worth making early and never revisiting except to confirm they still work.

The best test of whether this is set up correctly is boring: nothing weird happens, and you stop thinking about it. Excitement in this area is almost always a warning sign, not a feature.

Cap your frame rate

Sounds counterintuitive; it isn’t. Uncapped rates cause GPU thermal throttling. A stable 100 FPS often feels better than a jittery 120–140.

It’s worth taking a beat here, because this is where a lot of otherwise-solid setups quietly go wrong. The mistake is rarely dramatic — it’s a small default left unchanged, a checkbox unticked, a step deferred until later that later never comes.

The reason experienced users treat this as non-negotiable isn’t dogma — it’s that they’ve all been burned once and don’t intend to be burned twice. Learning from other people’s mistakes is cheaper than making your own, and this is one of the cheapest lessons on the whole subject.

If you’re troubleshooting an existing setup rather than building a new one, this is where you should look first. In our reader mail, nine out of ten “why isn’t this working” questions trace back to a decision made — or skipped — in this exact area.

What’s changed recently — and what hasn’t

Every twelve months brings a wave of new features, new products, and new opinions in this corner of technology. Some of it genuinely changes the right answer; a lot of it is noise dressed up as news. Part of our job on this guide is separating the two so you don’t have to.

The genuinely new: the tooling around gaming has matured significantly in the past year, cross-platform support has improved almost everywhere, and defaults are — for the most part — finally set to sensible values out of the box. That last point in particular means new users have a much easier time than they did a few years ago.

What hasn’t changed: the fundamentals. The habits and decisions that separated a solid setup from a fragile one three years ago separate them today. Attention to detail, willingness to spend a few minutes on setup, and a healthy skepticism about advice that sounds too good to be true — those never go out of style, and they matter here as much as anywhere else in technology.

Common mistakes to avoid

A few pitfalls come up repeatedly when readers tell us how they approached how to improve fps in pc games: a no-nonsense guide. Watching for these saves more time than any single tip we could offer, and they’re worth reviewing even if you’re an experienced hand — the small ones are the ones that catch experienced people, precisely because they look too obvious to be worth checking.

Under-investing in the fundamentals

A great cable, a proper mouse, a monitor at eye level. The unsexy fundamentals do more for daily quality of life than any flashy upgrade. The fix, in almost every case, is less work than the fix for the problem it causes when left unaddressed.

Waiting for the perfect moment

Most tech decisions have no clean window. If a change would help today and cost you a manageable weekend to switch, that’s usually enough justification. None of this is unique to any one product or platform; it’s a pattern of behavior that shows up wherever this kind of decision has to be made.

Following advice out of context

Every recommendation depends on assumptions — your setup, your priorities, your budget. Adapt guidance to your situation instead of applying it verbatim. If any of that sounds familiar from your own past attempts, you’re in good company — it’s the most common failure mode we see, and it’s fixable in a single sitting.

Trying to do everything at once

One change at a time. Measure the effect. Then decide what to do next. It sounds slow; it’s the only approach that actually compounds. It’s the kind of thing that feels like a small compromise at the time and looks obvious in hindsight — the whole point of listing it here is to give you the hindsight up front.

Pro tips from our editors

These are the habits that separate a workable setup from one that keeps paying you back years later. None require special software or expensive gear — just a little intention.

Optimize for reversibility. Choose the option that’s easiest to undo if it doesn’t work out. Reversible choices compound; irreversible ones become anchors.
Document as you go. A short note when you set something up saves an hour when you have to change it. Future-you is a stranger — write for them.
Review your setup quarterly. A calendar reminder every three months to look at what’s actually earning its space. Half of what you use monthly today, you won’t miss in a year.
Ship the small wins. One improvement a week beats a giant overhaul that never quite happens. Momentum matters more than scope.
Pick tools your community uses. The ecosystem around a tool matters more than a small feature advantage. Popular tools have more tutorials, more integrations, and better long-term prospects.

Tools and resources worth knowing about

A few tools we lean on for this kind of work — none are strictly required, but all are worth knowing about:

A reliable notes app — Whether it’s Obsidian, Notion, or Apple Notes, keeping a written record of settings and steps pays off the moment something goes wrong.
A trusted password manager — 1Password and Bitwarden are the two we recommend most. Both are dramatically better than reusing anything.
A backup routine — Cloud backup for convenience (Backblaze, iCloud, OneDrive), plus one local backup you can grab if the internet goes down.
A saved bookmarks folder — Screenshot the settings screens or bookmark the docs pages you’ll want again. Small effort, big future payoff.

Frequently asked questions

Is a better cable going to help my FPS?

Only if your current one is limiting refresh rate. HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 are what you need for high-refresh 4K.

Where can I ask a follow-up question?

Head to our contact page and drop us a line. Every reader message is read by an editor, and follow-up questions often become the seed for a future guide.

Is this suitable for beginners?

Yes. We wrote this guide to be approachable even if you’re new to the topic — every step is explained in plain language, and the advanced sections are optional.

How often does this need updating?

The core advice here changes slowly. We revisit our guides at least once a year to ensure product names, versions, and screenshots reflect the current state.

The bottom line

If you take one thing away from this article, let it be the mindset: pick one small improvement, ship it this week, and iterate from there.

The goal wasn’t to give you an exhaustive reference — those exist and they’re a poor way to learn. The goal was to give you the shape of the problem, a working set of steps, and enough context that you can adapt the advice when your specific situation doesn’t match ours exactly. If we’ve done that, you’re set.

If you’d like to go deeper on Gaming, we publish new guides in this category regularly — browse the archive to find the ones most relevant to your setup. Related articles are linked at the bottom of every post, and our search bar is a good way to jump straight to a topic if you already know what you’re after.

Have a question this article didn’t answer, a scenario we missed, or a correction to suggest? Drop us a line via the contact page. Reader questions genuinely shape what we write next — a fair number of our most-read guides started life as a single reader email that made us realize we hadn’t covered something important. Yours could easily be the next.

Thanks for reading, and good luck with your next step on “how to improve fps in pc games: a no-nonsense guide”. If this guide helped, the single best way to support the site is to share it with someone who’d find it useful — a link in a group chat, a bookmark, a mention on your favorite forum. That’s how HighTechBee grows, one considered recommendation at a time.