Video games demand more performance from our PCs with every passing year, but we can’t all afford to upgrade. But there are some shortcuts and workarounds we can use to help bridge the gap between PC performance and the demands of the next big game.
Overclock Your GPU For Better Performance
As games get more demanding and your GPU gets older, you may find yourself hitting frame rates under 60 FPS. Granted, you might be able to get back to that frame rate by compromising on graphics, but if you don’t want to do that, you should consider overclocking your GPU instead. This way, you can get more power out of your GPU using something like AMD’s Adrenalin or MSI Afterburner.
If you’ve never overclocked your GPU before, it can seem like a scary thing to try. It’s simple once you learn the basics, though: follow the instructions of the program you are using and don’t blindly copy settings over from other people online. You will have to play around with the voltage and frequency settings for your GPU to find the right balance, for your performance, but that’s just trial and error. Your GPU has built-in limits to keep you from accidentally damaging your hardware, so don’t worry about it too much.
If all you have to do is overclock your GPU a little to maintain the frame rate you want, that’s much more affordable than upgrading your GPU to something brand new, and it can keep your old hardware in the game a little longer.
Try Out Lossless Scaling For Frame Generation
AI frame generation is something with a little bit of controversy behind it. Some people consider them to be “fake” frames, but if you’re not hitting the frames per second that you want, you might want to give it a try. Frame generation is when an AI creates a frame between two being rendered by your GPU. It’s a little complicated, but basically, it can sort of artificially increase your FPS beyond what your GPU can actually manage. It’s a pretty notable feature in newer graphics cards.
Admittedly, these AI-generated frames can make a game feel a little weird sometimes, but only if you actually notice them, and most people don’t unless they are already running a game at a very high FPS. So frame generation isn’t great for fast-paced games, but in slower titles, it can make a noticeable difference, and you don’t have to actually buy a new graphics card to give it a try.
On Steam, there is a $7 program called Lossless Scaling. This is a third-party tool that can generate AI frames for any game even if that games doesn’t naturally support this feature. There’s no guarantee that this will revolutionize your gaming experience, but if you need to get more FPS out of your games and can’t afford a new GPU, $7 is a small price to pay to make that happen. It’s cheap enough to give it a shot.
Enable Resizable Bar and SAM if Possible
Smart Access Memory (AMD) and Resizable Bar (Nvidia) are PCIe technologies that may be able to help you boost PC performance. These technologies allow your CPU to access all of your GPU’s VRAM instead of being limited to chunks that are usually only 256MB at a time. Using these technologies could boost your FPS by 5%-15%, depending on your GPU and what types of games you play.
Unfortunately, these options are only available to you with certain hardware, like the RTX 3000 or RX 6000 and newer GPUs. You’ll need a relatively newer CPU as well, and you’ll need to be using UEFI instead of legacy BIOS. So it’s only an option under certain circumstances, but you should at least look into whether or not your GPU has the potential, since you could see an appreciable performance boost with just a couple of clicks.
Optimize Game Settings For Your Hardware
This might seem like obvious advice, but if you’re willing to bump down your graphics when playing a game, you can probably get a lot more performance out of your PC. When Space Marine II first came out, my PC did not have the power to run it at its highest settings. Heck, it couldn’t even run it on high graphics at all without me sacrificing some other nice features like shadows and textures at long ranges. But hey, I was able to play the game at a normal speed, and honestly, it still looked pretty darn good.
In a perfect world, we’d all be able to play games at their absolute peak graphics and effects, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Many games still look very good even a few graphical levels below the peak. Sometimes, it just means losing something like ray-tracing, which looks nice but isn’t worth barring you from decent performance. So if you can’t shell out for new PC hardware but you still want to play the newest game, consider optimizing the game settings to actually fit within your hardware limitations. You can always replay it later on max settings when you’ve upgraded.
Undervolt Your CPU
Undervolting a component probably doesn’t sound beneficial to gaming. After all, if you overclock a GPU for better performance, why would you undervolt your CPU? Well, you have to do it right, but undervolting your CPU can actually improve game performance, because it can help the CPU maintain boost clock speeds for longer periods of time.
The stock voltage for most CPUs is fairly conservative, ensuring that they have stability when paired with a diverse array of chips. This often means that they supply more voltage than actually needed, and that voltage transforms into more heat and more power draw, which will make your CPU throttle performance sooner when under significant load. So undervolting the CPU lets you trim off that excess, unneeded voltage.
This means less heat generation and less CPU throttling, so in games limited by your CPU, you’ll see fewer FPS drops and smoother frames, especially when gaming for a long time.
Clear Out Your Backlog of Old Games Before Buying New Ones
In a world where a hundred games come out every day, and you never need to go to a physical store to buy them, I think every gamer accrues a pretty large backlog of games that they constantly procrastinate on. “I’ll finish that game I bought one of these days…” and then three years pass since you bought it. You want to play it, you just never get around to it.
Well, guess what? That three-year-old game will probably run better on your dated PC than whatever just came out last week. And it’s still a perfectly good game that can give you a ton of fun, entertainment, and value. My point is, you don’t have to constantly participate in the race between PC hardware and game demands. If it’s going to be a while before you can upgrade your PC to the newest hardware to play the newest games, then fill the time with all the games you already have in your backlog.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like helpful advice when you really want to play the newest Battlefield on max settings, but if you just can’t afford to do that right now, the best way to tide yourself over and keep getting mileage out of your current hardware is to enjoy all of the games you already have that you’ve been putting off.
Eventually, there will be no getting around it: you will have to upgrade your hardware at some point if you want to keep up with the future of gaming. But parts are expensive and new ones are always coming out. If you need to eke a bit more mileage out of the stuff you have right now, these tips, and many others, can help you maximize that mileage.
