Disable Power Throttling: stopping Windows from slowing your own game
SHORT ANSWER
Setting PowerThrottlingOff to 1 under SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerThrottling stops Windows from throttling processes it judges to be non-critical. It matters most on laptops and on anything where a game, launcher or capture tool spends time out of focus, because Windows will otherwise slow those threads deliberately to save power.
Exactly what it changes
Read straight from the application source. If a tool will not show you this, it is asking for trust it has not earned.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerThrottling
PowerThrottlingOff = 1
Disables the OS-level power-throttling heuristic for all processes.
What it does
Windows watches which processes are in the foreground and throttles the rest, parking them at lower clocks to save power. The heuristic is good for battery life and occasionally wrong about what matters.
This is separate from your power plan. You can be on Best performance and still have individual processes throttled.
When it helps
- Stops background but latency-sensitive processes — voice chat, capture, launchers, anti-cheat — being slowed.
- Removes a cause of first-frame hitching when alt-tabbing back into a game.
- Most visible on laptops, where the heuristic is most aggressive.
When it hurts
- On a laptop running on battery, expect measurably shorter runtime and more heat.
- On a desktop already set to Best performance, the gain is often small.
How to undo it
Delete the PowerThrottlingOff value, or set it to 0, and reboot.
Verdict
Low risk and worth doing on a desktop. On a laptop, take it while plugged in and understand it costs battery.
Related guides
Everything else we change is listed too
All 127 optimizations are published in full, with what each one does and which are free. You can apply any of them by hand using pages like this one — the tool exists to do it in one click and put it back after every Windows update.