FREE PERFORMANCE TWEAKS & UPGRADES
Look, we are all hurting from the GPU stock vanishing on sight. Hopefully cards come back in stock, but for the time being I’ve got some great tips and tricks for squeezing the most performance out of your existing PC. Let’s start with the easy ones, ones you will likely know but maybe haven’t checked in a little while.
The first one is something I’ve mentioned in a few comparisons recently: enable XMP. XMP, or extreme memory profile is the option that holds your RAM’s rated speed and timings. If you bought a 3600MHz CL16 kit, but didn’t enable XMP, chances are it’s running at 2133 instead. Depending on what CPU you have, that can give you 20-30% performance in game by enabling it. That difference is specific to certain games, but if you want to find out more check out the series of videos I’ve got on RAM testing on both Ryzen and Intel! To enable it, head to your BIOS by restarting your PC and spamming the delete key until you get to your BIOS. Where to enable it can vary per motherboard maker, but generally if you head to the overclocking page it’ll be listed under memory settings. Enable it and press F10 to save your settings.
Next is in the same place, specifically it’s updating the BIOS. This often doesn’t give the biggest performance improvement, but if you have a newer chip, or you’ve never updated the BIOS before, you might see a sizeable advantage, plus potentially more stability and even some added features like Resizable BAR support, which is also an option you can enable to help improve performance as it lets your CPU address all your graphics card’s memory rather than tiny chunks at a time.
You can check what motherboard and BIOS version you have by pressing start, typing ‘dxdiag’ and running it, then under system (assuming you don’t have a prebuilt PC from the likes of Dell) you’ll see your motherboard name and below it the BIOS version. Then google the motherboard name, go to the page on the manufacturers site and click support, then BIOS, and you’ll see what the newest version available is. If it’s newer, download it and extract the files to a USB stick. Reboot and press delete until you get to the BIOS, then find the updater tool. It’s often called something “flash”, ‘EZFlash’ ‘instantflash’, something like that. Select your file, let it update, then when it’s done make sure to head back into the BIOS to re-enable your settings like XMP as it can often be reset by the update.
Back in Windows, something you may be familiar with are your graphics card drivers. If you haven’t updated them in a while, you might be missing out on some performance too. On top of the performance gains, depending on how old your drivers are, you might get access to new and improved UI – especially on AMD – and new features, from NVIDIA Reflex to decrease your system’s latency, or Radeon Boost for extra performance in games.
Updating your drivers can either be done manually by heading to either AMD or NVIDIA’s website and downloading the most recent stable driver, or if you have a recent enough version to have NVIDIA’s GeForce experience you can open that and download and install the most recent version from there. Or on AMD you can do the same straight from AMD’s driver from the updates button.
Another thing you can do while updating your graphics driver is make sure that Freesync or G-SYNC is enabled, and your display is set to run at its maximum refresh rate. I know, this technically doesn’t improve your performance, but it does improve your gaming experience and that’s what it’s all about right? In the NVIDIA control panel, if you have a compatible monitor and you are using DisplayPort or HDMI with a GTX 16 series or RTX series card, click “Set up G-SYNC” and enable it. Personally I’d have it enabled for both windowed and fullscreen.
On AMD, open Radeon Settings, click display then check the AMD FreeSync option, assuming you have a supported monitor and GPU – you should be able to use either HDMI and DisplayPort.
As for your screen refresh rate, that can either be done in the driver, or universally in Windows. Right click on your desktop, click Display Settings, click “Advanced Display Settings”, then on newer versions of Windows the option is now right there, on older versions you have to click “Display adaptor properties for Display 1”, then click the “monitor” tab, then change it there.
Lastly for the easy ones, for Ryzen users, installing the latest version of the Ryzen Chipset driver can give performance and stability improvements, plus for Ryzen 3000 series users you even get a new Windows Power Plan called Ryzen Balanced that you’ll want to enable for a little extra performance too. Even if you aren’t using Ryzen, setting your PC to the “High Performance” power plan can net some benefits too.
Next are the options I call “technically overclocking”. Don’t attempt these unless you are potentially willing to void your CPU warranty, and you have a good CPU cooler to keep on top of the added thermals. For AMD Ryzen users, heading to your BIOS and enabling Precision Boost Overdrive and setting higher PPT, TDC and EDC targets will mean your CPU will automatically boost higher on its own. Unfortunately that doesn’t often translate into better gaming performance, but it can be worth a try especially if you have one of the slower non-X CPUs like a 3600.
If you are running an Intel CPU from the last couple of generations, you can change your power limits too. Some boards call it “multicore enhancement”, some ask you what type of cooler you have and adjust the PL1, PL2 and Tau values which does the same thing as Ryzen, it lets the CPU boost for higher and for longer. Again only use these if you have a good cooler!
Next is actually overclocking, specifically of your graphics card. More graphics power is almost always the best way to get more performance in games, and seeing as most of us can’t get a new, or used card, upgrading the performance of your current one might just be your best bet. You can use a tool like MSI Afterburner, or if your GPU comes with it’s own like EVGA Precision you can use that – or if you are an AMD card owner their GPU driver comes with it’s own overclocking tools built right in. If you are on an NVIDIA card, Afterburner is a good shout, so benchmark your existing performance – many games offer built in benchmarks or you can use a tool like Unigine Heaven or Superposition, then try increasing the power limit, core speed and memory by a 5 or 10MHz at a time and checking the performance difference. You want it to be stable so no artifacting on screen and no crashes. Keep increasing them until either it’s having issues, the temps are too high or you aren’t seeing any extra performance.
For AMD, you can head to the performance tab and literally just click the auto overclock button. You can dive in deeper and tweak the settings yourself which is the same process as in Afterburner really, but since it’s got an option to do it automatically you can use that. Conversely you can also try the auto undervolting option which likely won’t net you more performance but may decrease heat output while not hurting performance, so a decent tradeoff.
Finally, a few of the esoteric options. First off here is removing the bloatware and tracking that comes with Windows 10. You can use a powershell script to do that, there are a few to be found on Github, but the principle is the same. They often not only remove the tracking and preinstalled apps, but also let you customise your system to how you want it. Do you want it so when you open a new Explorer window it shows you This PC rather than Quick Access? You can do that. Remember to add a hash next to the options you don’t want to run, and remove them from the options you do, and enable scripts in Powershell.
Lastly is quite niche to a certain setup – specifically if you have a lower end GPU with 1 or 2GB of VRAM and two or three monitors connected. Just having the second or third monitors connected takes extra VRAM and processing power from your GPU even if they aren’t doing much which can hurt your gaming performance. I’ve got a video on the performance impact coming soon so make sure you are subscribed for that.
Otherwise, those are my tips for getting more performance for free. If you’ve got any others you’d like to share leave them in the comments below!
