How to Increase FPS on PC: The Complete 2026 Guide
Short answer
UpdatedTo increase FPS on PC, work in order of impact: enable XMP/EXPO in BIOS, update your GPU driver, set Windows to the best-performance power mode, then disable shadows, post-processing and motion blur in game and turn on DLSS, FSR or XeSS at Quality. How much that adds depends on your hardware: a PC that has never been tuned gains the most, and its frame times usually get much steadier.
Key takeaways
- Order matters more than the number of tweaks. Memory profile, driver, power mode and four in-game settings account for most of the gain that is available to you.
- Shadows, post-processing, volumetric effects and ray tracing are the four settings with the worst quality-per-frame ratio in almost every modern engine.
- Upscaling at Quality (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) is usually the largest single free gain on any GPU that supports it, because the GPU renders fewer pixels for every frame.
- Frame-time consistency beats peak FPS. A steady, capped frame rate feels sharper than a higher one that keeps swinging.
- Every change here is reversible. Make a restore point first and change one thing at a time so you can attribute the result.
- Time required
- 30-60 minutes
- Difficulty
- Beginner to intermediate
- Typical gain
- Depends on your PC; largest on one never tuned
- Reversible
- Yes: every step
- Risk to anti-cheat
- None: no game files are modified
Why the order of your tweaks matters more than the number
Most FPS guides are a flat list of forty things. That is the wrong shape. Performance problems have a single bottleneck at any given moment (your GPU, your CPU, your memory bandwidth, or your storage) and a tweak that does not touch the current bottleneck does nothing at all. Applying thirty settings and gaining four frames usually means twenty-nine of them were irrelevant and one was the actual fix.
The sequence below is ordered by expected gain per minute spent. Work down it and stop when you hit your target. Before you start, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, open the Performance tab, and watch GPU and CPU utilisation while you play for two minutes. That tells you which half of this guide matters to you.
| Setting | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| GPU at 95-100%, CPU below 70% | GPU-bound | Lower graphics settings and enable upscaling. Resolution and effects quality are your levers. |
| CPU at 90-100% on some cores, GPU below 90% | CPU-bound | Memory speed, background processes and draw-distance settings matter. Lowering resolution will not help. |
| Both below 80%, FPS still low | Frame cap or power limit | Check for an in-game FPS limit, V-Sync, a power-saving plan, or a laptop running on battery. |
| Average FPS fine, but visible hitching | Frame-time problem | This is stutter, not low FPS, and needs a different fix. See the stutter guide linked below. |
The four changes that produce most of the gain
If you only do four things, do these. On a typical mid-range 2022-2024 build they account for the large majority of the headroom that software tuning can recover.
Enable XMP or EXPO in BIOS
Restart, press Delete or F2 to enter BIOS, and find the memory profile setting (XMP on Intel boards, EXPO on AMD). Enable profile 1 and save. Most prebuilt and self-built systems run RAM at the JEDEC fallback speed until you do this, which holds back CPU-bound games and open-world titles most of all.
Install the current GPU driver cleanly
Download the latest Game Ready driver from NVIDIA or the latest Adrenalin package from AMD, not from Windows Update, which lags several months behind. Choose the custom install option and tick 'Perform a clean installation'. Day-one drivers for new releases often carry fixes and gains for the titles they target.
Set the Windows power mode to Best performance
Settings > System > Power & battery > Power mode > Best performance. On laptops, also set this in the manufacturer utility and keep the machine plugged in. Balanced mode parks cores and lowers clocks aggressively, which shows up as inconsistent frame times rather than a lower average.
Turn on upscaling at Quality
In any game that offers it, enable DLSS on NVIDIA RTX, FSR on AMD, or XeSS on Intel Arc, set to Quality. This renders at a lower internal resolution and reconstructs the frame, which usually returns more frames than any other single setting for a difference most players cannot see in motion. Never enable two upscalers at once.
Which in-game settings to lower first
Graphics settings are not equal. Some cost a great deal of GPU time and change almost nothing you will notice at 1% of a second during a gunfight. Lower these first, in this order, and stop when you hit your target frame rate.
| Setting | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Ray tracing / path tracing | Off | The single most expensive setting in any engine that offers it, often by a wide margin. In a competitive shooter it is pure cost. |
| Shadow quality | Low | Historically the second-largest GPU cost. Low shadows also make enemies in dark corners easier to see, so this is a competitive gain as well as a performance one. |
| Volumetric fog / clouds / lighting | Low or Off | Expensive, and actively obscures targets. In most modern engines this is the third-largest single cost. |
| Post-processing | Low | Bundles bloom, lens flare and chromatic aberration. Costs frames and reduces target clarity. |
| Motion blur | Off | Costs a small amount of GPU time and smears exactly the fast movement you need to track. Roughly two thirds of competitive players disable it outright. |
| Ambient occlusion | Off or SSAO | The high-quality variants (HBAO+, RTAO) are disproportionately expensive for a subtle contact-shadow effect. |
| Anti-aliasing | TAA or the cheapest available | Necessary for image stability in UE5 titles. Turning it fully off in a modern engine produces severe shimmer, which is worse than the frames you save. |
| Texture quality | High, if VRAM allows | Textures are nearly free on frame rate provided they fit in VRAM. Keep them high. If you exceed VRAM you get stutter, not lower FPS: drop one step if that happens. |
| View / draw distance | High in competitive games | This is a CPU cost, not a GPU one, and lowering it can hide distant players. Keep it up in shooters; lower it in single-player if CPU-bound. |
Windows-level tuning that actually moves the needle
A great deal of Windows tweaking advice on the internet is folklore that stopped being true around 2015. These are the changes that still hold up in 2026, with an honest note on what each costs you.
| Setting | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Game Mode | On | Settings > Gaming > Game Mode. Suppresses background scheduling and Windows Update restarts during play. Small but free, and it prevents the worst interruptions. |
| Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling | Test both states | Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Change default graphics settings. Required for DLSS Frame Generation. On some CPU and driver combinations it helps frame times; on others it hurts. This is one of very few settings where you genuinely have to test. |
| Optimizations for windowed games | On | Same screen as above. Gives borderless-windowed games a low-latency presentation path close to exclusive fullscreen. Meaningful for anyone who alt-tabs. |
| Variable refresh rate | On, if you have a VRR monitor | Same screen. Lets windowed games use G-Sync or FreeSync. |
| Xbox Game Bar background recording | Off | Settings > Gaming > Captures. Continuous background capture holds GPU encoder resources and costs frames for a feature most players never use. |
| Startup apps | Prune aggressively | Task Manager > Startup apps. Launchers, RGB utilities and overlay software each hold memory and inject into your game process. This is one of the most reliable stutter fixes on older systems. |
| Storage | Game on an SSD or NVMe | Several 2025-2026 releases now require an SSD and behave badly on mechanical drives. Moving a game off an HDD does more for traversal stutter than any registry key. |
Chasing frame-time consistency, not peak FPS
Average FPS is the wrong metric to optimise. What you actually feel is frame time (the millisecond gap between one frame and the next) and its consistency. A game running at a locked 144 FPS delivers a frame every 6.9 ms, every time. A game averaging 190 FPS but oscillating between 250 and 90 feels visibly worse, because your eye tracks the drops, not the average.
- Cap your frame rate a few frames below your monitor's refresh rate. On a 240 Hz panel with G-Sync or FreeSync, cap at 234-237. This keeps you inside the VRR window and prevents the latency spike that occurs when you hit the refresh ceiling.
- Turn V-Sync off in game. If you use G-Sync, enable V-Sync in the NVIDIA Control Panel instead: it acts as a safety net at the top of the VRR range rather than a frame limiter.
- Enable NVIDIA Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag 2 in every game that offers it. It shortens the render queue, which both lowers latency and smooths delivery.
- Let shader compilation finish. Unreal Engine 5 titles stutter heavily on first launch while they build the shader cache. Sit in the main menu or a practice range for a few minutes after a game or driver update rather than diagnosing a problem that resolves itself.
- Watch your VRAM. Exceeding it produces sharp, repeated hitching rather than a lower average. Drop textures one step and see if the hitching stops.
Doing the Windows side with an app
Everything above is manual, and it is genuinely worth doing manually once so you understand your own system. The Windows side is the most tedious part: dozens of settings spread across Settings, the Control Panel, the registry and the GPU driver. Updates can also reset some of them, so check your key settings after a big Windows or driver update.
Frozen Tweaks puts that Windows side in one app. Each catalog tweak is its own switch, listed publicly with what it changes, and every free tweak has an undo switch. Pro adds a one-click run that makes a Windows restore point first, and game profiles for Fortnite and Valorant. It never injects code into a game, never reads or writes game memory and never edits game files. It does not change BIOS settings, install drivers or set your in-game options, so those steps above stay with you. It also does not re-apply anything by itself after updates.
For the Windows side, our tweak catalog explains each setting with the exact values it changes and how to undo it, for example hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling, Game DVR and the Game Bar, power throttling, core parking and background apps.
Frozen Tweaks
Free for Windows 10 and 11
The free version has no time limit and needs no payment details, so you can measure the difference on your own hardware before deciding whether Pro is worth paying for.
v2.0.0 · 6.4 MB · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · free account, no payment details
Or type frozentweaks.com on your PC.
Questions
How much FPS can I realistically gain from software optimization?
It depends on your hardware and on how untuned the system is, so nobody can give you an honest number without seeing your PC. On a typical Windows 11 system that has never been tuned, the largest single contributions come from enabling XMP/EXPO, a clean current GPU driver, and upscaling at Quality. On a system that is already well configured, expect far less. Anyone quoting a fixed figure regardless of your hardware is guessing.
Is it safe to use FPS boosting software with anti-cheat?
It depends entirely on what the software does. Tools that change Windows, power and GPU driver settings operate outside the game process and are not something anti-cheat systems flag. Tools that inject into the game, modify game files, or hook the rendering pipeline can and do trigger bans. Check which category a tool falls into before installing it. Frozen Tweaks is in the first category and never modifies game files.
Does lowering my resolution increase FPS?
Yes, substantially, if you are GPU-bound, but it should be your last resort in a competitive game because it makes distant enemies smaller and harder to resolve. Use DLSS, FSR or XeSS at Quality instead where available: it lowers the internal render resolution for most of the same gain while keeping your output resolution and UI sharp.
Why is my FPS high but the game still feels laggy?
That is an input-latency or frame-time problem, not a frame-rate one. The usual causes are V-Sync being enabled, no frame cap on a VRR display, NVIDIA Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag being off, running in windowed mode without the Windows windowed-games optimization, or a badly configured monitor overdrive setting. Frame rate and responsiveness are related but not the same measurement.
Do registry tweaks still improve gaming performance in 2026?
A small number do: interrupt priority and network throttling keys still have measurable effects on specific hardware. The overwhelming majority of registry tweaks circulated online are either placebo, apply to a Windows version that no longer exists, or were quietly made the default years ago. Treat any registry tweak you cannot explain the mechanism of as noise.
Tweaks in this guide
Each setting below has its own page in the tweak catalog: what it changes in Windows, what it costs, and how to undo it.
Sources
- Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling (Microsoft DirectX Developer Blog) (opens in a new tab)devblogs.microsoft.com
- Optimizations for windowed games in Windows 11 (Microsoft Support) (opens in a new tab)support.microsoft.com
- PresentMon (Intel) (opens in a new tab)game.intel.com
Written by
Frost LIVEFounder of Frozen Tweaks, based in Hamburg, Germany. Publishes settings guides for competitive games on his YouTube channel, Frost LIVE.
Related guides
- Windows 11 Gaming Optimization: What Still Works in 2026An honest audit of Windows 11 gaming tweaks: which settings still measurably help in 2026, which are placebo, and which quietly cost you security.8 min read
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- How to Reduce Input Lag on PC: The Whole Latency ChainInput lag is nine separate delays stacked together. Here is each one, roughly how long it lasts, and which of them are actually worth fixing on a gaming PC.8 min read
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Frozen Tweaks
Free for Windows 10 and 11
58 tweaks free, each with an undo switch. Never edits game files.
v2.0.0 · 6.4 MB · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · free account, no payment details
Or type frozentweaks.com on your PC.
The free Windows app for competitive games.
58 tweaks free, each with an undo switch. Never edits game files.
v2.0.0 · 6.4 MB · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · free account, no payment details
Frozen Tweaks runs on Windows. Send the link to your PC and download it there.
Or type frozentweaks.com on your PC.