Many PC gamers fall into two camps: those who run the game, choose a graphics preset, and have fun, and those who fine-tune various settings until they get the smoothest experience possible. The first type can ignore a few stutters here and there even on a limited budget, but the second will go to great lengths to get the most out of its graphics card. Luckily, there’s a feature you can enable on your monitor to fix a few issues: AMD’s FreeSync. Does FreeSync improve FPS?
In short, if your monitor supports this (chances are it does, as even budget monitors do), it’s best to enable FreeSync, as it will make your gaming smoother. Certainly, the feature only brings a marginal improvement in terms of FPS (around one to two additional FPS on average), but that is not the only point of activating it. FreeSync synchronizes your graphics card’s frame rate with the monitor’s refresh rate, eliminating stuttering and screen tearing. The end result is smooth gameplay with minimal annoying visual artifacts.
You really have nothing to lose by trying it. So open your monitor’s functions menu (with the physical buttons) and search for AMD FreeSync. All that remains is to download the latest graphics drivers and enable FreeSync in the Radeon settings. What if you use Nvidia? In this case, Nvidia graphics cards have a technology called G-Sync, which works essentially the same way.
What else should you try to get extra FPS?
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So a game keeps struggling and dragging you out of the experience. Before you head down the rabbit hole, think about a few settings you can change in-game. It’ll be a bit of a balancing act between visual pop and technical performance, and you need to decide how much you want to downgrade the graphics. Regardless, the non-negotiable should be VSync. If you have adaptive sync like FreeSync, you don’t need this dinosaur technology, so you should start it. Same with motion blur, which gamers have grown to hate, and additional effects like film grain and depth of field (things most won’t really miss). When it comes to large downgrades, always try to reduce shadows, as rendering them can consume a lot of resources.
If you’re still not satisfied, try reducing the overall load on your PC by closing all background processes in Task Manager and make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. You should even open the case and check if the inside of your machine is covered in dust. This can absolutely send your CPU and GPU temperatures through the roof. Since a clean case improves airflow, this is bound to give the machine some relief and allow it to spit out some FPS.
Finally, avoid overclocking, enable AI resolution scaling and one of the available image generation settings. Of course, pushing them to the extreme won’t allow an older PC to run Cyberpunk 2077 perfectly, but it will give you better performance at the cost of extra input lag and unstable textures. However, don’t use this one as a crutch. Enabling FreeSync, lowering graphics settings, and other tips should serve to improve the baseline, and the AI settings are there just to round things out and make the game even better.
