About FPS in Gaming
FPS, short for frames per second, means how many frames are displayed every second on the screen during the gameplay. For example, when you get 30 FPS, 30 different images appear each second. Currently, 60 FPS is a standard. Of course, the optimum FPS depends on the refresh rate of your monitor.
In most cases, having a high FPS in a game is always better, which indicates you can enjoy smoother animations and gameplay. FPS lower than 30 for modern games can lead to stuttering, lag, or screen tearing. This is why you should consider “how to increase FPS on PC”.
Low FPS likely stems from an outdated graphics card driver, insufficient RAM, incorrect in-game settings, a slow HDD, etc. Next, we will elaborate on several effective methods to boost FPS on your PC to gain optimal gaming performance.
#1. Optimize PC for Gaming with MiniTool System Booster
When it comes to “how to get more FPS on PC”, you may consider killing unnecessary background processes, deleting unused applications, changing your power plan, and speeding up CPU & RAM to boost your PC for gaming to increase FPS. The PC optimizer, MiniTool System Booster, has rich features to do all those tasks.
This utility is tailored for speeding up Windows 11/10/8/7 to reduce lag spikes and low FPS so that you have a smooth gaming experience. So, how to optimize PC for gaming? Here is a short guide to help you.
Step 1: First, download & follow the on-screen instructions to install MiniTool System Booster.
MiniTool System Booster TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Step 2: After launching it, you notice the ActiveCare feature. Please enable it to turn on automatic PC maintenance at idle time. Or, hit RUN SCAN and fix found issues to ensure peak performance.
Step 3: To increase FPS, you had better run Deepclean to speed up the Internet speed, remove Internet junk files, and delete Windows temporary files to free up disk space for your game, defragment your hard drive, and free up some RAM. The relative cleanup tasks involve NetBooster, Internet Cleanup, Windows Cleanup, Program Accelerator, and Memory Mechanic.
Step 4: To uninstall unnecessary applications to free up disk space for gaming, hit Advanced Uninstaller under Toolbox. To end resource-hungry processes, click Process Scanner.
Step 5: For peak gaming performance, set the power plan to Ultra Performance-Gaming on the LiveBoost page.
That’s all you should do to respond to “how to increase FPS”.
In addition to MiniTool System Booster, there are some other ways you can try to increase FPS on your laptop/desktop.
#2. Update Graphics Card Driver
How to boost FPS on PC? Consider a GPU driver update.
Owning a high-end graphics card ensures a great gaming experience but it cannot unleash its true performance without the right GPU driver. Upgrading your GPU driver can dramatically improve FPS.
Step 1: Access the driver website from AMD, NVIDIA, or Intel.
Step 2: Select the appropriate driver depending on your graphics card to download.
Step 3: Implement the installation using the downloaded file.
#3. Adjust In-Game Settings
In case you suffer from performance issues such as low FPS and lag spikes while playing a game, how to get more FPS on PC and optimize the gaming performance? Adjust some in-game settings, as listed:
- Disable V-Sync, which may cause screen tearing. If yes, re-enable it.
- Reduce or disable Anti-Aliasing to boost the FPS.
- Lower graphical quality, including reflections, shadows, lighting, and textures to run more smoothly.
- Reduce draw distance to block the game from rendering far-off objects.
- Tone down some graphical effects, such as motion blur, lens flares, and others to improve the frame rate.
- Lower resolution to reduce GPU’s stress to increase FPS.
#4. Enable Game Mode
How to increase FPS in Apex Legends, Minecraft, and other video games? Windows has a feature called Game Mode. Enabling it to prioritize system resources for gaming, boosting the performance.
Step 1: Navigate to Settings.
Step 2: Head to Gaming > Game Mode in Windows 10/11.
Step 3: Enable this option.
#5. Manage Power Option
How to increase FPS on laptop? One important thing is making sure your power mode is set to Best performance when plugged in. Click the battery icon in the taskbar to change the setting.
#6. Overclock Your GPU
Your graphics chip can be also the bottleneck that triggers low FPS, lag, and stutter. To increase FPS and improve overall performance, proper GPU overlocking is a good idea.
On the market, there are many friendly overclocking tools for this task. Don’t know how to do it? Refer to this guide on How to Overclock GPU.
#7. Add an SSD to PC
Compared to an HDD, an SSD provides the best reading & writing speed. If you install your game on a hard drive but encounter low FPS, try to add an SSD to your PC and switch to it for gaming. This guarantees peak performance during gameplay.
For a PC with one disk slot, replace the HDD with an SSD. Aiming at purpose, we suggest using MiniTool ShadowMaker, the best disk cloning software, to clone HDD to SSD, without reinstalling Windows OS, apps, and games. Then, install the new SSD to your PC after cloning.
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Step 1: Connect your SSD to the PC and launch MiniTool ShadowMaker.
Step 2: Go to Tools > Clone Disk.
Step 3: Select the source disk and target disk, register this tool as you are dealing with system disk cloning, and begin cloning.
Other Tips
How to increase FPS on your laptop/desktop in addition to these ways above? Do the following tasks:
- Upgrade or replace RAM
- Change a graphics card
- Disable background tasks in Task Manager
- Defrag your hard drive
- Enable hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling
- Adjust your monitor refresh rate
- Speed up the Internet
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Vera is an editor of the MiniTool Team since 2016 who has more than 7 years’ writing experiences in the field of technical articles. Her articles mainly focus on disk & partition management, PC data recovery, video conversion, as well as PC backup & restore, helping users to solve some errors and issues when using their computers. In her spare times, she likes shopping, playing games and reading some articles.