How to Improve Your FPS for Better Gaming (Without Buying New Hardware)

In general, PC gamers care more about frame rates than their console counterparts. And they should: as a platform, PC offers far higher levels of customization than consoles, letting you tweak all kinds of graphics presets, output resolutions, and advanced rendering techniques like ray tracing. But what if you’re a PC gamer and don’t want to buy new hardware to increase the frame rate of your favorite games?

Although many PCs have been panic buying to avoid RAMageddon 2026, financially sensible people don’t need to wipe out their bank balances on a new GPU or upgraded RAM to experience smooth 60 or even 120 fps. Below, we’ll walk you through simple settings tweaks to improve performance, while also telling you which graphics features to avoid if you’re using a modest rig hungry for smooth frame rates.

Remember the basics first: close background apps so they don’t fight for resources your game can use, and clean up your gaming rig if it’s been a while. Excess dust in your case means the system has to work harder to cool it, rather than putting that juice toward performance.

First, go to the game menus and start lowering the graphics settings. Texture quality, shadows, and effects like ambient occlusion can all create strain on your GPU if you’ve set these sliders too high, so it’s worth reducing them to medium or low if you’re struggling to lock in a stable frame rate. Also consider disabling features like motion blur and V-sync in-game to reduce input lag, then limit your frame rate via NVIDIA Control Panel or AMD Radeon software to prevent screen tearing.

The difference between high and low settings in many games isn’t always huge, especially during fast-paced actions. Unless you’re obsessed with graphics fidelity, it’s a good idea to choose a less demanding preset if you want a locked 60fps, as there is an inverse relationship between graphics quality and performance. Many modern titles automatically detect optimized settings the first time you start a game by calculating the hardware you’re using. This eliminates a lot of tedious trial-and-error tinkering, and in my experience, auto-detection helpers work particularly well in games like Forza Horizon 6 And GTA V: Enhanced Edition.

There are less obvious ways to improve frame rate performance that don’t involve diving into graphics menus. While the results won’t be as significant as, say, a drop in your internal resolution, turning off recording software (like the solutions offered by the NVIDIA app and Xbox Game Bar) can help. Regularly download the latest AMD or NVIDIA drivers, as well as update the NVIDIA or AMD application itself. Of course, if an update suddenly breaks your game, roll back the driver.

You should also make sure Windows 11 is optimized to run games as well as possible. To get the most out of the operating system, go to Settings > System > Power (and battery) > Power modethen set the slider to Better performance. It’s especially worth switching to this power mode if you’re gaming on one of the best gaming laptops – just keep an eye on battery life. Also head to Settings > Games > Game Mode and make sure it’s enabled; this will deprioritize other processes while you are playing a game.

Oversampling has become a crutch that many modern AAA games cannot live without. With the blockbuster titles of 2026, your best bet for increasing FPS is to rely on an upscaler. NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 is currently the most robust upsampling solution on the market, producing results that are often as good as native resolution while performing much better. AMD’s FSR 4 is a great option for those with RDNA 4 cards, like the Radeon RX 9000 series, although the older open source FSR 3 remains a decent alternative for owners of older GPUs. If your system has an Intel Arc card, XeSS is also worth enabling.

Upsampling uses AI and deep learning techniques to take low internal resolutions and scale them up to much higher output. This means your GPU has to natively render far fewer pixels, with the AI ​​handling the reconstruction work, resulting in higher frame rates. Take NVIDIA’s DLSS presets, the quality of which looks almost as good as the native output, but only renders 66.7% of the pixels. Moving down to Ultra Performance, which only renders 33% of the native resolution, while still providing a surprisingly sharp image that should seriously boost your frame rate.

For modern cards, frame generation can also increase your frames per second…at a cost. While NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation technology can let you game Cyberpunk 2077 With path tracing in 4K at over 200fps with the x6 multiplier, input lag can increase significantly when the technology is enabled. Forcing your GPU to buffer AI-assisted interpolated frames often adds considerable latency, but can provide a smoother (if not felt) experience. If your GPU supports frame generation, it’s worth playing around with in some titles, especially if a game supports demanding ray tracing. On this point…

Ray tracing is an absolute performance killer. Compared to old-fashioned rasterization methods, this advanced rendering technique can hamper frame rates. Even the most powerful graphics card on the planet, NVIDIA’s RTX 5090, can drop a lot of frames when the RT features are pushed to the max. If you’re playing some of the best PC games on a mid-range or aging graphics card and want to get some performance back, ray tracing is the first graphics setting you should turn off.

Unlike pre-computed raster effects, RT realistically simulates lighting, shadows, and reflections in real time by bouncing rays around the game environment. This effect can be particularly immersive in the case of ray-traced shadows, with Cyberpunk 2077 And Resident Evil Requiem being two of the most impressive poster boys for advanced RT features.

The problem is that ray tracing can often reduce your frames per second by half (or more), even on high-performance GPUs. If you’re not comfortable with a 50% performance drop, it’s best to disable RT, especially if you don’t have a cutting-edge GPU.

Path tracing is even more demanding. Unless you own an RTX 5090 or RTX 5080, you should avoid this feature (admittedly it’s only available in a handful of PC games at the time of writing). Unlike normal ray tracing, which often limits the effect to lighting, shadows, and ambient occlusion, path tracing handles the entire lighting system in these two previously mentioned titles, plus Doom: Dark Ages. While it’s quite stunning, path tracing can bring even the 5090 to its knees in Cyberpunkwith results dropping to around 30fps in 4K if you turn off DLSS and frame generation. Ray tracing and path tracing sound great, but they are extremely expensive.