While new hardware is sometimes the only option, it’s not always the case...
Is your gaming system struggling to run as well as you want it to? Is it faltering when it comes to play the latest games, and generally failing to capture the magic it had when you first built it? Well, you’re not alone in that. Every gaming system goes through this phase, it would seem.
You could simply replace the whole system from the ground up, but that’s expensive and – to be honest – more than a little bit lazy. So, before you get your wallet out and hit high street for new components, you might want to try these 10 tips for boosting a gaming system first and see how they work.
1 Install New Graphics Card Drivers
The graphics card is the most essential component in any gaming system, so it really pays to keep it in good shape. That means making sure you have the right drivers installed so games can take full advantage of its capabilities. Older and out of date drivers – even if they’re only a couple of weeks old – can mean the latest titles aren’t getting the power they deserve.
We’re not talking a trivial amount here either. A simple graphics card driver update has been known to improve performance by up to 70%. It’s usually a lot less than that, admittedly, but it almost never goes the other way – and even if it does, rolling back drivers is easy. There’s virtually no reason not to have the latest ones installed.
The drivers themselves are easy to get hold of. Nvidia and AMD both post the latest on their websites (you can even install beta versions if you can’t wait for the fully tested versions – and betas are the best way to get the fastest framerates on the newest titles) while Intel’s drivers for onboard graphics chips are easy to get hold of using Windows Update.
2 Clear Out Your Hard Drive
Games are often quite data-heavy, and that means two things: they need a fast hard drive access and they need the space to properly swap data in and out of virtual memory. If you drive is near-full and fragmented, you’ll see the performance drop represented quite directly in your framerates.
The first thing to do is make sure your drive has plenty of free space available. If at all possible, make sure it has at least 20% of its space unused (but the more, the better). Then run a full defrag on it. Defragging a drive will order the contents so free space is kept together, making it faster to read and write from, which means games won’t be as badly held up by drive access times.
If you have an SSD the bottleneck will be much lower, but you can still optimise the disk by using the TRIM command. This wipes any unused sectors, making them slightly quicker to access – but in fairness, you’re not going to see anywhere near as much of an increase (if you see one at all) as if you defragment a mechanical drive. Take heart, though – SSDs are already significantly faster than mechanical drives, so you’re still way ahead.
3 Kill Background Processes And Software
If you pay attention to such things, it’s very quickly clear, that games use up a lot of system resources to run. They generally need as much RAM, drive space and CPU time as your system can possibly devote to them to ensure their smooth running, so if you have a lot of programs running the background, your game isn’t going to be getting all the resources it needs. The solution is simple: stop them running before you play. Or indeed, forever!
As an operating system, Windows is particularly bad for allowing programs to run stuff in the background without letting you know. The program is that every program you install seems to think it needs a helper app running at all times, and that it’s justified in doing so because it’s only using a small amount of your system’s full capabilities. It doesn’t take long before they stack up and those small chunks of resources suddenly becomes a large system drain.
To see your background services, you can press Ctrl-Alt-Del and look at the process manager (you may need to google the names of some to see if they’re needed) to see what’s running so you can uninstall any you don’t want, and you can also look at your list of background services in the control panel and turn off any which you know you don’t need. It isn’t likely to give you a huge boost – but every frame counts!
4 Overclock Your Graphics Card
Overclocking a graphics card GPU can be intimidating in a way that CPU overclocks rarely are these days, especially if you’re worried about having to apply extra cooling. As we’ve already established, though, gaming performance is tied to your graphics card performance – so if you can squeeze any more out of it it’s worth doing.
With that in mind, a small overclock might be worth doing if you have a card with a fairly good cooler. Many cards are sold slightly overclocked as it is, but if yours isn’t one of them you can almost certainly get a few more MHz out of it. Most graphics drivers allow overclocking in software, so increment the card’s speeds in 5% jumps and perform stress-testing benchmarks after each turn. As soon as the stability falters, revert to the previous setting and you should be good to go.
Remember that overclocking can damage your hardware so it’s done at your own risk, and will almost certainly shorten the lifespan of your card – though if you think how often you’ve had to replace a graphics card because it failed completely, that may not be as huge a disincentive as it sounds.
5 Upgrade Your Processors
How old is your current graphics card or CPU? If the answer is more than a couple of years, then chances are that even the mid-price hardware on the market is capable of running yours into the ground. This, we’re afraid, means it’s time for an upgrade.
Hardware upgrades can be an expensive way to get a performance hike, so unless you have a huge amount of money spare it’s rarely worth upgrading just to play a specific game. Rather, once you see a pattern of choppy framerates and discover yourself switching detail levels to minimum more often than not, then you should make the leap.
You should be looking for around a 25-50% improvement when upgrading if you want your hardware to tide you over for another couple of years. We’d recommend starting with a GPU first, partly because it’s usually the thing holding games back, but also because upgrading your CPU can often mean a new motherboard and possibly even RAM – and that’s when the costs start to stack up. A high-end graphics card with a mid-level CPU will run games far better than a high-end CPU with a mid-level graphics card, so concentrate on that first. It’s the best way to see effects quickly.
6 Install An SSD
As we said before, hard drive speed is tied to game performance and slow drives can mean games that stutter and struggle to run. If cleaning up your existing drive isn’t practical, you could spend some money on an SSD instead.
SSDs are super-fast and effectively remove any storage-based bottlenecks that you might experience while gaming. They’re also cheaper than a CPU or graphics card upgrade. While the performance hike isn’t likely to be as big as a new GPU might offer, you should see a notable improvement – especially if the hardware bottleneck is coming from your hard drive.
The good thing about SSDs is that you don’t have to replace your standard hard drive to use one – you can simply run the two in tandem. This gives you access to the increased speeds of the SSD’s storage while retaining the capacity a mechanical drive gives you, which considerably mitigates the low storage capabilities of solid state hardware that might otherwise put you off. Given that you can pick up 240GB of SSD for less than £100, it’s probably the best value upgrade you can make in terms of gaming performance.
The only down side? If you’ve already got an SSD, the improvements you can make by adding one or upgrading are negligible. Otherwise, it’s probably the best place to start.
7 Disable Superfetch & Prefetch
If you’re already running an SSD, you should probably turn off these two Windows features as well. Superfetch and Prefetch are services designed to reduce application loading times, but they’re only intended for use with mechanical hard drives. If you’re running an SSD, they’re actually just getting in the way of smooth operation.
The most recent SSDs see less of a negative effect from this type of problem, but if you’re running and older one then you could see major improvements in how fast your games (and other applications) launch by disabling them.
To switch them off, go into the services area of your control panel and find the entry for ‘Superfetch’. Set it to disabled (or manual) so it stops running automatically. Disabling Prefetch is a little trickier – open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters. Double click on ‘EnablePrefetcher’ in the right-hand panel and then change the ‘Value Data’ to ‘0’ (the default setting is ‘3’). Make sure not to change anything else – editing the registry is a tricky business and has the potential to cause major configuration problems with Windows if done incorrectly!
8 Tweak your Graphics Card’s settings
Whether you want to overclock your GPU or not, there are still plenty of settings in your graphics card’s control panel that you might want to switch on or off if you’re starting to find that games lag when you’d rather they didn’t. For Nvidia cards, it’s worth looking at the following areas of your 3D settings:
Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames: A high value here results in smoother framerates, but can also be the cause on input lag. If your games seem sluggish, that could be the reason. Drop it down to ‘1’ and your card will always be processing the latest frame, improving responsiveness.
Threaded Optimization: This option should always be set to ‘ON’ (though it isn’t). It allows your GPU to take full advantage of multicore CPUs rather than restricting operation to a single CPU core.
On AMD/ATI cards, look for these options in the section marked 3D application settings:
Smoothvision HD Anisotropic Filtering: Anisotropic filtering uses smart algorithms to stop textures in the distance from being distorted, but it can massively increase the load on your GPU. Disabling it might slightly affect visual quality, but unless you’ve playing at super-HD resolutions you probably won’t even notice.
Mipmap Detail Level: Again, this is related to texture quality. High detail levels use full HD textures, whereas low ones allow the textures to be compressed, resulting in a slightly blurrier look. Again, most of the time you won’t notice any change while you’re actually playing, so feel free to drop it down and take the resulting framerate hike.
9 Disable Vsync
On all graphics cards, whether AMD or Nividia, you’ll find a setting known as ‘Vsync’. This refers to ‘Vertical Sync’ and means making sure that your graphics card sends an update synchronously with your monitor’s refresh rate.
Disabling Vsync can lead to a visual phenomenon known as ‘tearing’, where the problem is essentially that your screen has updated while only half of the image was drawn in the graphics card. But it also means that games have a slightly faster framerate, because they’re always churning through the next frame and never idling while they wait for the monitor to update.
Note that this only has an effect if your in-game framerate is lower than your monitor refresh rate. Most monitors update at 60Hz, so if your game is running at 80fps (which is admittedly quite high) you probably won’t see any difference. The majority of users will see some speed improvement, though, so it’s definitely worth considering. At the very least, if the graphical issues are a problem they’re easy to remove – simply turn Vsync back on!
10 Physically Clean Your PC
Remember that system performance can be directly connected to how hot your hardware is. This is why overclocking requires extra cooling, and why gaming cases provide extra space for additional fans and vents. The goal is to keep your components as chilled as possible – which is why you probably shouldn’t have a thick layer of dust inside your GPU fan or CPU heatsink.
Dust makes components inefficient, and worse – it can make them noisy as well, by forcing them to run at full speed all the time, or worse, unbalancing fans on their bearings so they rattle. Clearing out the dust will result in a performance improvement, even if it’s only tiny, and will also improve the lifespan of your expensive (and less expensive) components.
All you need to do is remove the side or of your case and blow the dust out of your fans using a can of compressed air. You can use a lightly damp cloth to wipe dust off non-electrical components, but any liquid has the potential to corrode or otherwise interfere with circuitry, so don’t mix the two if you can help it! Finally – and it should go without saying, but doesn’t – don’t ever take a vacuum cleaner to your PC. They build up static and can seriously damage hardware!