The lack of optimization of PC games compared to console games is a fact, although we are not going to go into it in this article, since we cannot do anything about everything that is beyond our control. What we can do as users is to change what is within our power. That is why we will talk to you how to set up a computer to get better performance and so you can play games better without having to upgrade your computer.
It’s happened to all of us when we have to touch the game settings several times until we get unsatisfactory performance and visual quality. However, many of the options have Martian-sounding names to most users. What does the abbreviation AO stand for? What is an anisotropic filter? And many others. Well, in what you’ll read below, you won’t find that definition, but rather you’ll learn that graphics settings, if set incorrectly, can make games run worse.
Change settings and increase performance in games
There are several reasons why your games could perform better, but they don’t, and going game by game is a waste of time. This is why we recommend that you always use the NVIDIA Control Panel if you are a GeForce RTX or GTX user to change some settings in the general settings of your games. The same can be said about the AMD Radeon add-on. In particular, you should activate the options that provide low latency, this will reduce the time it takes for certain components to do their work, and you will see that the games will gain some fluidity. In particular, it is important to activate the low-latency mode in NVIDIA and Radeon Anti-Lag in AMD.
Turn on game mode to play comfortably
Another general change is the activation of Windows 10 and 11’s gaming mode, which will close several apps and services in the background and even disable notifications from various apps. Accessing it is easy:
- Click on the Windows menu or press the same key between the left CTRL and ALT.
- Select settings
- Click on games and from there you can activate gaming mode.
On the other hand, don’t forget to update your drivers and make sure there aren’t any extra apps you don’t need running in the background. Before playing, we recommend that you back up all your work, close your applications, and completely relax. In most games, you’re going to be interacting in full-screen mode, so there’s no point in keeping those apps open.
What configuration parameters should you pay attention to in games?
In the menu of each game we have to activate and deactivate the options to find the one that gives us the best performance. The problem is that some of them are GPU overload, either because you’re running out of memory or because they’re GPU overload.
However, if the game is running poorly, before lowering the resolution, you need to look at the usual suspects, which are:
- Smoothing type.
- The quality of lighting and shadows is crucial, finding the right balance between quality and performance is something you’ll have to try a few times.
- Be careful with V-Sync, although it prevents tearing but increases latency.
- If your graphics card has less memory than the game recommends, lower the texture quality.
- If your game allows it, activate DLSS or FSR, you will appreciate the extra performance.
- Ray tracing, or real-time ray tracing, also significantly degrades performance, even if your graphics card has dedicated hardware for it.
We realize that these are very simple options for those of you who are more enthusiastic, however, we think it’s important that everyone knows how to set up their games in a basic way and look at what elements they need to set up. In any case, as a last resort, you can always resort to lowering the resolution, as it always serves to improve performance and get enough fps in games.
Finally, it should be noted that we have other alternatives, which in this case include allowing third-party programs to control performance settings in games. These programs, of course Experience GeForce If you have an NVIDIA video card or AMD software if your graphics card is AMD, as both have a database of recommended configurations for best performance based on hardware hardware.
