Make Windows faster for games

A frame counter in the corner is the whole method. Turn on the in-game FPS display, or open Xbox Game Bar with Windows+G and pin Performance. Play the same spot for a minute: a smoke on a site, a drop, a team fight. Write down the number when it is busy, not the number in an empty lobby.

Change a single setting. Play that spot again. If the busy number did not move, put the setting back. Average FPS hides the stutters you actually feel. If the counter dips hard every time an effect appears, that dip is the problem, not the peak.

Windows calls mouse acceleration “Enhance pointer precision.” When it is on, the same physical swipe moves the crosshair farther if you flick faster. That makes muscle memory impossible: a slow swipe and a fast swipe of the same distance do not land in the same place. Turn it off, then leave it off for every game on this site.

The pointer-speed slider has a neutral notch. It is the sixth mark, dead center. That notch moves the cursor one-to-one with the mouse. Anything left or right of it scales the movement in Windows even after acceleration is off. Set the slider to the middle, uncheck Enhance pointer precision, and press Apply.

Do the same inside the mouse’s own software. Logitech G Hub, Razer Synapse, and the equivalents from Glorious, Lamzu, and Pulsar all have an acceleration or angle-snapping toggle. Angle snapping drags your swipe toward a straight line. Both belong off. The DPI you play on is a preference. 400, 800, and 1600 are all normal. What is not normal is a different DPI in the software than the one you think you set.

Windows can forget the refresh rate after a driver update, a new cable, or a monitor that woke up on HDMI instead of DisplayPort. Advanced display is the check. The cable matters: a lot of high-refresh monitors only reach their top rate on DisplayPort.

Variable refresh (G-Sync, FreeSync, or Adaptive Sync) belongs on if the monitor supports it. V-Sync inside the game stays off. V-Sync waits for the monitor and adds delay. If tearing bothers you with variable refresh on, cap the frame rate a few frames under the monitor’s rate instead of turning V-Sync on.

These live under Settings, System, Display, Graphics. Game Mode is separate, under Settings, Gaming. Leave Game Mode on. It tells Windows to quiet background work while a game is in the foreground. It is not a large FPS boost. It is the correct default.

Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling lets the graphics card schedule its own work. On a current NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel card with a current driver, leave it on, then restart. It is also required for some frame-generation features. If a game starts stuttering right after you turn it on, turn it off, restart, and compare that same busy spot. Keep whichever holds the frame time steady.

Optimizations for windowed games helps DirectX 10 and 11 games that run borderless or windowed. It switches them to a newer presentation path, which cuts delay and lets variable refresh work. Leave the default on. Restart the game after changing it. Auto HDR turns this on by itself. Auto HDR is a picture feature, not an FPS feature. On a normal SDR monitor you can leave it off.

A laptop with two graphics chips will sometimes run the game on the weak one. Add the game under Graphics, open Options, and set GPU preference to High performance. Then check Task Manager, Performance, while the game is running. The discrete GPU’s usage should move. If only the integrated chip moves, the game is still on the wrong GPU.

Settings, System, Power. While plugged in, Best performance is the right mode for a desktop and for a laptop you are playing on. Best power efficiency will pull clocks down. Balanced is fine on a desktop that is not misbehaving. You do not need a third-party power plan.

If the case or laptop is hot, frames fall because the chip is protecting itself. Dust, a blocked vent, and a laptop on a blanket do this. The fix is airflow, not a registry edit. Watch temperatures with the GPU software or with Task Manager if the number is already there. Sustained throttling looks like a frame rate that is fine for a minute and then sags.

Each overlay draws on top of the game. Discord, Steam, the NVIDIA App, Xbox Game Bar, and a monitoring tool all do it. Pick one. Turn the others off. The FPS change is often small. The stutter when an overlay updates is not.

Startup apps are the other leak. Settings, Apps, Startup. Disable launchers and updaters you do not need sitting there. Leave the GPU driver component and your mouse software if the mouse needs it. RGB suites and “PC optimizer” tools are the usual waste.

A browser with a pile of tabs, especially a stream or a video, will steal CPU and memory during a game. Close it or pause it. A second monitor playing a video is a real cost on a weaker CPU.

If the RAM is running at the slow default instead of the speed you paid for, that is a BIOS setting. It is usually called XMP, EXPO, or DOCP, under the memory profile. Enable the profile the RAM was sold with, save, and boot. If the PC does not boot, the motherboard will typically fall back after a few failed starts. Do not type voltages by hand.

Resizable BAR (AMD calls the same idea Smart Access Memory) lets the CPU see the whole graphics-card memory. Turn it on in the BIOS if the board offers it and the card is from the last several years. Leave it if it is already on.

Install the game on an SSD. A hard drive is a stutter machine: the frame rate looks fine until the game loads a texture and the whole picture hitches. After a driver update, a one-time shader compile is normal. Let it finish. Deleting the shader cache every day only makes you compile it again.

Update the GPU driver when a game you play just launched or just patched, or when you are chasing a stutter that started after the last update. You do not need every weekly driver on the day it appears. Read the two lines of notes. If your game is not in them and the PC is stable, waiting is fine.

Use the removal option in the new installer, or the vendor’s clean-install checkbox, when the driver is corrupted: a black screen after an update, a control panel that will not open, or a game that broke on a specific driver and survived a rollback. A weekly clean install is how people break a working PC.

Polling rate is how often the mouse reports its position. 1000 Hz means once a millisecond. That is the right default for these games. 2000, 4000, and 8000 Hz shave a fraction of a millisecond and can stutter a CPU that is already busy, especially on a laptop or with a crowded USB hub. If the frame time gets worse after you raise the polling rate, put it back to 1000.

Plug the receiver into a USB port on the motherboard, not a hub and not a monitor’s USB socket, when you are chasing a stutter. Wireless is fine in 2026 if the receiver is close and the mouse is charged. A dying battery shows up as a cursor that freezes for a frame, which feels like a network problem and is not.

Lift-off distance is how high the sensor still tracks when you pick the mouse up. Low is what you want, so a reset of the mouse does not drag the crosshair. Set it in the mouse software. The pad should be big enough that you are not lifting every swipe. If you are, lower the in-game sensitivity or raise the DPI. Do not turn acceleration back on to “reach” the target.

Windows spatial sound, loudness equalization, and the “enhancements” tab on a Realtek device are processing passes. They can make footsteps sound wider and they can also add delay and a little CPU work. For a first test, set the output format to 24-bit 48000 Hz, turn enhancements off, and use the game’s own headphone mode. If you like Windows Sonic or Dolby Atmos after that, turn one of them back on and keep the other off.

The path is Settings, System, Sound, the output device, then Properties or the device’s enhancements in the old Sound control panel. Disable all enhancements. Exclusive mode can stay on. It lets the game talk to the device more directly.

The in-game Reflex, Anti-Lag, or low-latency option should win. In the NVIDIA App or the NVIDIA Control Panel, set Low Latency Mode to On or to Application controlled, not Ultra for every program on the PC. Ultra for one game is a test, not a religion. Power management mode can be Prefer maximum performance for that game only.

Leave Image scaling and sharpening off until the game’s own picture is chosen. A driver sharpen pass on top of FSR or DLSS makes edges noisy and hides whether the game setting helped. Shader cache stays on. Turning it off to “save space” is how you buy a stutter the next time you launch.

AMD Software: Anti-Lag or Anti-Lag 2 on for the game, Radeon Chill off while you test, Boost off, Enhanced Sync off. Chill is a frame cap in disguise. If your FPS will not go above a number you did not choose, Chill is the first place to look.