How to Optimise Games on PC for Better FPS for Free in 2026

The short version: Most of the frame rate you're losing right now has nothing to do with your graphics card and everything to do with Windows running in the background, drivers you never updated, and in-game settings you've never opened. Fix those three things, in that order, and you can gain 15 to 40 extra frames per second without spending a penny. Buying a new GPU before you've done that is throwing money at a problem you haven't diagnosed.

Why your FPS problem probably isn't your hardware

I'll say the thing most PC optimisation guides skip over because it's a bit awkward: the biggest single drag on your frame rate on a Windows machine is Windows itself. Not your CPU, not your GPU, not your RAM. The operating system, with its telemetry, its background updates, its Xbox Game Bar recording your gameplay whether you asked it to or not, its dozens of startup apps you forgot you installed. Every guide tells you to update your drivers and lower your shadow quality. Almost none of them tell you that a stock Windows 11 install is fighting your game for CPU cycles the entire time you play.

That's good news, weirdly. It means the fix is free and it's yours to do today, not something you need to save up for.

Step 1: Find out what's holding you back

Before you touch a single setting, open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and go to the Performance tab while your game is running in windowed or borderless mode. Watch three numbers: CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory. If your GPU is sitting at 99% and your CPU is at 60%, your graphics card is the limiting factor and lowering resolution or shadow quality will help most. If your CPU is pegged at 95%+ and your GPU is at 60%, you have a CPU bottleneck, and no amount of turning down textures will fix it because your card is waiting on your processor, not the other way round. This one check saves you hours of tweaking the wrong sliders.

Step 2: Strip Windows down to what your game needs

• Turn off Xbox Game Bar and background recording (Settings > Gaming > Xbox Game Bar, toggle off). This alone has been shown by users on forums like r/pcgaming to recover 5 to 10 FPS in CPU-heavy titles because it stops Windows constantly buffering a recording of your session.
• Switch your power plan to High Performance or, on newer Windows builds, "Best Performance" under Settings > System > Power. Balanced mode throttles your CPU clock speed to save power, which is the last thing you want mid-firefight.
• Close Chrome, Discord overlay, Spotify and anything else with more than three tabs open. Chrome alone can eat 1 to 2GB of RAM per tab and steal CPU threads your game wants.
• Disable startup programs you don't need via Task Manager's Startup tab. Anything marked "High impact" that isn't your antivirus can usually go.
• Update your GPU drivers directly from NVIDIA, AMD or Intel, not through Windows Update, which lags months behind. A driver update alone can add 10 to 15% in specific titles when the manufacturer has optimised for that game.

A worked example: the five-year-old laptop

Say you're playing Call of Duty Warzone on a laptop with a GTX 1660, an i5-9300H, and 16GB of RAM. On High settings at 1080p you're getting 45 FPS with noticeable drops in busy fights. Here's what happens if you work through the free fixes in order:

• Turn off Xbox Game Bar and close background apps: 45 to 51 FPS.
• Update the NVIDIA driver to the latest Game Ready version and run a clean install: 51 to 58 FPS.
• Switch power plan to High Performance: 58 to 61 FPS.
• Drop shadows from High to Medium and turn off motion blur (motion blur is pure overhead with zero gameplay benefit): 61 to 74 FPS.
• Set resolution scale to 90% instead of 100% (barely visible difference on a 15-inch screen, big frame gain): 74 to 88 FPS.

That's a jump from 45 to 88 FPS, all free, all reversible, done in under an hour. No new graphics card, no new laptop. This is a hypothetical run-through, but the individual gains per step match what's widely reported for this generation of hardware, and it's the order I'd work through on any machine in this bracket.

Step 3: The in-game settings that matter

Not every slider is equal. These are the ones that move the needle:

• Shadows and reflections are the biggest FPS cost for the smallest visual payoff. Drop these first, always.
• Resolution scale (render scale) lets you keep your native resolution for UI sharpness while rendering the game itself slightly smaller. 85 to 95% is nearly invisible and frees up real GPU headroom.
• VSync should be off if you're chasing raw FPS; it caps your frame rate to your monitor's refresh rate and adds input lag. Use it only if you're seeing screen tearing and don't have a variable refresh rate monitor.
• Frame rate cap: paradoxically, setting an FPS cap 5 to 10 below your monitor's max refresh rate often smooths out stutter because your GPU isn't working flat out every single frame.
• Motion blur, chromatic aberration, film grain and lens flare cost frames and add nothing to competitive play. Turn them all off.
• Textures can usually stay high if you have 6GB+ of VRAM, since texture quality affects VRAM more than raw FPS. Don't sacrifice these first.

Free tools worth installing

• Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) does a clean wipe of old GPU drivers before you install a new one, which fixes stuttering caused by conflicting driver leftovers.
• MSI Afterburner is free and lets you monitor GPU temperature, clock speed and usage live, overlaid on your game, so you can see exactly when and why you're dropping frames.
• Process Lasso lets you set core affinity so your game gets priority access to specific CPU cores, useful on older quad-core chips running modern titles.
• Windows Game Mode (Settings > Gaming > Game Mode) is worth leaving on, though I won't pretend it does as much as Microsoft implies. It mostly stops background updates interrupting you mid-session rather than boosting FPS directly.

When free fixes hit a wall

I want to be blunt about this because it saves you time: if your CPU usage is already at 95%+ after all the above and your GPU is idling, you have a genuine hardware bottleneck and no free tweak will fix it. At that point the honest options are lowering your expectations for that title, playing at 1080p instead of 1440p, or accepting that an upgrade is coming. There's no setting that manufactures CPU cores you don't have.

If your machine simply isn't going to run 2026's demanding shooters well no matter what you do, that's not the end of PC gaming for you. Plenty of good games run beautifully on modest hardware. If you're weighing up what still plays well on an older machine, I've put together lists of freeware puzzle games worth downloading and offline racing games that run without needing a beefy GPU, both of which are far kinder on ageing hardware than the latest triple-A shooter.

The uncomfortable bit about "optimisation" videos

A lot of the tuning guides on YouTube with millions of views recommend registry hacks and third-party "game booster" apps that promise 20% more FPS. Most of these do nothing measurable, and some actively slow your PC down by adding their own background processes, which is exactly the problem you were trying to solve in the first place. If a tool asks you to install anything beyond a driver utility, a monitoring overlay, or a driver cleaner, be suspicious. The free fixes that work are boring: close things, update things, turn off effects you don't need. There's no secret registry tweak that outperforms simply not running fifteen browser tabs behind your game.

A quick note if you play across devices

If gaming for you isn't just desktop shooters but also stealing ten minutes on your phone during a commute, the same "strip back what's running in the background" logic applies there too. I've tested a lot of what runs well with no data connection and no bloat in my rundown of offline Android games that work in airplane mode, and separately looked at survival games for low-end phones for exactly the same reason: getting something that runs smoothly on modest hardware instead of fighting for frames on something that's fighting you back.

And if part of your gaming life is building an audience around your setup or your clips, that's a marketing job as much as a gaming one, which is a different skill entirely to frame rate tuning. My roundup of Facebook tools for 2026 covers the free options worth knowing if you ever go down that road.

For the rest of the series, see the Free Games to Play Offline and Online: Every Guide in One Place (2026).

Related: gaming (this site).

Frequently asked questions

Can I really get better FPS without spending any money?

Yes, in most cases. Updating drivers, closing background apps, switching your Windows power plan to High Performance and turning off shadows, motion blur and VSync in-game will typically add 15 to 40 FPS on a mid-range machine, all at no cost. It won't turn a CPU-bottlenecked laptop into a gaming rig, but it will fix the majority of stutter and low frame rate complaints.

Does turning off Xbox Game Bar make a difference?

It can add 5 to 10 FPS in CPU-heavy games because Windows stops running a background recording buffer of your session even when you're not using it to record anything. Turn it off in Settings > Gaming > Xbox Game Bar.

Why does my FPS still drop even after lowering every setting?

Check Task Manager while you play. If your CPU is near 100% and your GPU is well below that, your processor is the bottleneck, not your graphics settings, and no amount of lowering shadows or textures will fix that because those settings mainly affect GPU load, not CPU load.

Should I use third-party "FPS booster" software?

Be cautious. Most of these tools make no measurable difference and some add their own background processes, which works against the exact problem you're trying to solve. Stick to manufacturer driver updates, Display Driver Uninstaller for clean driver installs, and MSI Afterburner for monitoring; those are the free tools with a genuine track record.