If you want to play modern titles on your gaming PC today, you often need powerful hardware. However, with a few tricks, you can squeeze even more performance out of your current graphics card.
You don’t necessarily need an RTX 3080 or RTX 3060 to play games smoothly. MeinMMO presents you with some settings and tips that you can try to improve your gaming experience. This way, you can also play new games smoothly with older graphics cards.
Where do our tips come from? We have extensively researched, gathered the best tips for your graphics card, evaluated them ourselves, and tested them with our own hardware. Thus, our own experiences have also been incorporated into this list.
The Basics: Basic Tips to Start
To start, we’ll share 3 basics that everyone should do regularly:
- Update your graphics card drivers.
- Install all important Windows updates and the latest DirectX.
- Remove dust and dirt from the computer and fans.
Especially having an up-to-date graphics card driver is important. AMD and Nvidia regularly release new versions of their software. These come with important bug fixes and improved stability for games. So if you’re playing a brand new game, updating old software is worth it.
Control Airflow in the Case
Once you’ve addressed the basic issues, check how your graphics card is doing. Temperatures play a crucial role in performance.
To monitor your component temperatures, the small freeware tool HWMonitor is sufficient (via Cpuid.com). Here, you can keep an eye on all temperatures and also your case fans.
This is why good airflow is important: Proper ventilation of your components ensures that they stay cool and do not throttle their performance. If the processor and graphics card get very hot, they throttle performance to reduce temperature.
Airflow means that cold air can flow past important components and warm air can escape.
Additionally, well-cooled components do not wear out as quickly, which extends the lifespan of the processor and graphics card.
Here’s what you can do: If you find that your graphics card gets very hot while gaming and the fans can hardly keep up, you can try a few things:
- Check where your PC is located. If it’s directly against the wall at the back, warm air cannot escape. Putting your PC in a cabinet is also only conditionally useful for airflow.
- Look at how many fans you have installed in the case. Ideally, one fan should pull in cold, fresh air while another fan pushes warm air out of the case.
- Use available cable management to hide troublesome cables. Wild cables disrupt airflow.
- Another option is to underclock your GPU. You lose little performance, but significantly less heat is produced.
In our follow-up article, you can find 8 more tips to keep your PC cool and make it faster. Here, we also explain what to look for if your computer is heating up quickly and why good ventilation is important for your hardware.
If your hardware still overheats, there’s also the option of switching cases. Some cases offer additional opportunities to improve airflow within the case.
Try Lower Resolution
The higher the resolution, the more the graphics card has to calculate. The amount of displayed pixels increases with screen resolution, and thus the demands on the graphics card also rise.
The advantage is: If you reduce the resolution, for example from Full HD (1080p) to HD (720p), you get a smoother image because your graphics card has to calculate less. This is especially worth trying if you want to play new games with older hardware.
If you have a powerful graphics card, you can also try resolution scaling: The image is rendered at a higher resolution and then shrunk to the actual displayed resolution. This makes the image appear sharper and details a bit finer. However, for this to work, you also need sufficient performance.
The disadvantage is: Lower resolutions look less appealing. The viewing distance is lower, and depending on the resolution, the image may even appear slightly blurry if you change the aspect ratio, for example, from 16:9 to 4:3. Here, it also depends on your monitor.
Furthermore, not all games support lower resolutions: Some games already require a minimum resolution from the user to even start the game. For example, the real-time strategy game Starcraft II requires a minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768. Our tip is only conditionally helpful if the demands are already high.
You can see the difference between HD (720p) and Full HD (1080p) in this YouTube video, which we have embedded here for you:
Find the Best Graphics Settings for Each Game
In most games, you can adjust the graphics settings to save performance and thus achieve more FPS. Graphics settings that consume performance include, among others, resolution:
- Anti-Aliasing
- Shadow Quality
- Anisotropic Filtering
- Effect Quality
- Depth of Field and Motion Blur
- Physics Engine
- Texture Quality
This is Anti-Aliasing: This is a graphic filter that smooths out rough/jagged edges that occur in graphics. The technique is processor-intensive, and you can already save performance here by reducing anti-aliasing.
This is Shadow Quality: This setting makes the game look more realistic and prettier with shadows. You can often gain a lot of performance from your graphics card here.
This is Anisotropic Filtering: This refers to a technique that allows distant textures to be displayed sharply. However, when reducing the filters, the gain in performance is rather low.
This is Motion Blur: This is the German term “Bewegungsunschärfe”. Things in the center of the image are focused during fast movement while the edges blur. We perceive this as a kind of tunnel. If you reduce or completely turn off motion blur, you can save a considerable amount of performance depending on the game.
Adjust the Game’s Physics Engine: Known techniques here are PhysX from Nvidia or Havok, which are used in many games. These techniques often provide additional effects, such as improved representation of liquids or leaves on trees. Here, you can undoubtedly save performance, but you need to try out different settings.
You can forgo these settings: You can easily tweak some options without significantly affecting graphics:
- You can turn off motion blur and save performance. In some games, it can also make your game appear smoother.
- With anti-aliasing, you can also lower several levels without experiencing noticeable graphic losses.
- You can turn off additional physics effects, such as extra hair physics. These are mainly details that require performance, but in a fast firefight, they play a minor role.
- You can also adjust several levels in the shadow settings and gain some performance.
Overclock the Graphics Card
To get a little more performance out of your graphics card, light overclocking of the GPU can be worthwhile. However, you should be very careful to avoid damaging your hardware. Additionally, there are a few things to consider if you want to overclock the graphics card.
What is a recommended tool? A recommended tool here is MSI Afterburner, which you can download directly from the provider (via MSI.com). The program is free and allows you to make several adjustments to graphics cards.
What to keep in mind when overclocking: In general, you should proceed very cautiously if you want to overclock your graphics card.
- For memory speed or GPU clock, you should increase it by a maximum of 5 percent at a time. Go slowly and cautiously.
- Avoid settings like the voltage of the graphics card. If you are not familiar with it, leave the defaults as they are. The risk is not worth it.
- You should not use more than 5-10 percent overclocking.
- Ensure that your graphics card is well-ventilated and your power supply is strong enough. If your power supply is too weak, the PC may simply shut down in the worst case.
- In Afterburner, you can also set and increase the GPU power limit. The power limit refers to the maximum power consumption of the graphics card. If you raise the limit, the graphics card can draw more power from the power supply. However, you’ll also need a correspondingly fast power supply.
More tips and tricks: If you are considering building a new PC yourself because you have received a new graphics card or simply want to upgrade: Here are tips to consider when building a PC.
