How to Optimise Your Gaming PC Performance: Windows Settings, Drivers, and Tweaks That Actually Work
A new gaming PC does not automatically perform at its best out of the box. These Windows settings, driver configurations, and network tweaks can add 15–30% to your gaming performance without spending a dirham.
You have built or bought a gaming PC. You have installed your games. But frames per second are lower than benchmarks suggest, input lag feels inconsistent, and you are not sure the hardware is running as well as it should. The reality is that Windows 11, fresh out of the box, is not configured for gaming — it is configured for general consumer use, with energy saving, background app activity, telemetry, and features that actively reduce gaming performance. Here is a systematic guide to what actually needs changing, in order of impact.
The Single Most Important Setting: Windows Power Plan
Gaming laptops and desktops default to the Balanced power plan, which dynamically throttles CPU clock speed to save energy. When a game requests a burst of CPU processing — loading a level, running physics calculations, handling AI — the CPU has to ramp up from a lower state first. This delay shows up as stuttering and inconsistent frame times.
Switching to High Performance locks the CPU at its maximum clock speed at all times, eliminating ramp-up delay. Testing by Linus Tech Tips and Hardware Unboxed showed a 12–15% FPS improvement on AMD Ryzen systems switching from Balanced to High Performance, with more pronounced gains during CPU-bottlenecked scenarios.
- Desktop PCs: Control Panel > Power Options > High Performance (or Ultimate Performance if available)
- To enable Ultimate Performance: open PowerShell as admin, run: powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
- Gaming laptops: only use High Performance when plugged in — it drains battery in minutes on battery power
- Verify: Task Manager > Performance > CPU — clock speed should now stay elevated under load
On AMD Ryzen systems, also enable Precision Boost Overdrive in AMD Ryzen Master software — this allows the CPU to boost above its rated clock speed when thermal headroom allows. The combination of High Performance power plan and PBO provides the largest single free performance gain on AMD gaming PCs.
GPU Driver Installation: Clean Install vs Standard Update
Windows installs generic GPU drivers automatically — these are not optimised for gaming and can be months out of date. NVIDIA Game Ready Drivers and AMD Adrenalin Edition drivers include game-specific optimisations, bug fixes, and performance improvements that generic drivers do not.
A clean driver installation removes all remnants of previous driver versions, which accumulate over time and cause crashes, black screens, and performance anomalies. NVIDIA's own benchmark data shows 8–15% performance variance between outdated and current Game Ready Drivers on titles released after the driver version.
- Download DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) from wagnardsoft.com — free, safe, widely used
- Boot into Safe Mode: Settings > Recovery > Advanced startup > Troubleshoot > Safe Mode
- Run DDU > Clean and restart
- Download latest NVIDIA Game Ready Driver from nvidia.com or AMD Adrenalin from amd.com
- Install using Custom Installation and check Perform clean installation
Disable Xbox Game Bar and Background Recording
Xbox Game Bar is a Windows overlay that runs constantly in the background, even when you are not using it. It consumes CPU and GPU resources to monitor for the Win+G shortcut and maintain its capture pipeline. Background Recording maintains an active video encoding process at all times.
Digital Foundry performance testing showed a 5–8% FPS improvement on mid-range gaming systems after disabling Game Bar and background recording, with the gains more pronounced on systems with less VRAM and older CPUs.
- Settings > Gaming > Xbox Game Bar > toggle Off
- Settings > Gaming > Captures > Record in the background > toggle Off
- Settings > Gaming > Captures > Record audio when I record a game > toggle Off
- Use NVIDIA ShadowPlay (GeForce Experience) or AMD ReLive instead for clip capture — both have lower overhead than Game Bar
Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS): Enable It
Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) moves GPU memory management from the Windows CPU scheduler to the GPU itself. This reduces the CPU overhead of managing GPU tasks and can lower input latency — particularly on CPU-bottlenecked systems.
HAGS is available on Windows 11 with NVIDIA GTX 10-series or later, and AMD RX 5000-series or later. TechPowerUp benchmarks show 2–6% FPS gains on CPU-bottlenecked configurations with negligible impact on GPU-bottlenecked scenarios. There is no performance downside to enabling it.
- Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Change default graphics settings
- Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling > toggle On
- Restart required for the change to take effect
- Also enable in NVIDIA Control Panel: Manage 3D settings > Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling > On
Windows 11 also includes DirectStorage — a feature that allows NVMe SSDs to load game assets directly to the GPU without routing through the CPU. This dramatically reduces level-load times in supported games. It is enabled by default on Windows 11 with an NVMe drive. It is a strong reason to use NVMe over SATA SSD in a gaming build.
Network Adapter Settings for Lower Gaming Latency
Network adapter drivers include power-saving settings that add latency to network packets in exchange for reduced power consumption. For gaming, where every millisecond matters, these settings should be disabled.
Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) adds processing delay to the receive path to save a few milliwatts. Interrupt Moderation Rate controls how often the adapter notifies the CPU of incoming packets — on default it batches them, which adds inconsistent latency (jitter) to gaming traffic.
- Device Manager > Network Adapters > right-click ethernet adapter > Properties > Advanced tab
- Energy Efficient Ethernet: Disabled
- Interrupt Moderation Rate: Disabled or Extreme
- Receive Buffers: maximum available value
- Green Ethernet / Power Saving Mode: Disabled
DLSS, FSR, and XeSS: AI Upscaling for Better Performance
NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS are upscaling technologies that render games at a lower resolution and use AI or spatial algorithms to reconstruct a near-native-quality image — at significantly higher FPS. DLSS Quality mode at 1440p renders internally at approximately 960p and reconstructs to 1440p, delivering 30–45% higher FPS with visual quality that is difficult to distinguish from native rendering in motion.
DLSS is available only on NVIDIA RTX cards. FSR works on any GPU and is slightly lower quality but still a substantial improvement. These are not visual compromises — at Quality or Balanced mode, the upscaled output is genuinely comparable to native rendering during gameplay.
- NVIDIA DLSS (RTX 2000-series+): Quality for best visuals, Balanced for more FPS, Performance for maximum FPS
- AMD FSR (any GPU): similar quality tiers, broadly supported across AMD and NVIDIA cards
- Intel XeSS (any GPU): strong quality, growing game support
- Disable V-Sync in-game — use G-Sync or FreeSync at hardware level instead
- Frame cap: set 5–10 FPS below monitor refresh rate to reduce GPU heat and tearing
Storage: Moving Games to SSD Makes a Real Difference
Game load times and open-world level streaming are directly determined by storage speed. A game on a mechanical HDD loads 60–70% slower than on an SATA SSD, and 80–85% slower than on an NVMe SSD, based on benchmarks from Digital Foundry and GamersNexus. If your gaming PC has a mix of drives, move your active games to SSD.
Do not defragment an SSD — Windows TRIM handles SSD optimisation automatically and defragmentation accelerates SSD wear without any benefit.
- Check drive type: Win+R > dfrgui > shown as Solid State Drive or Hard Disk Drive
- Move games to SSD via Steam: right-click game > Properties > Local Files > Move install folder
- NVMe upgrade cost in UAE: AED 200–400 for 1TB NVMe (Samsung 990, WD Black SN770) at Sharaf DG
- NVMe vs SATA SSD for gaming: meaningful in open-world streaming (Cyberpunk, Elden Ring); less in arena games (Valorant, CS2)
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