How to optimize your Windows PC for best gaming experience?

Want to optimize your Windows PC for those first-person competitive shooters you love? Video game enthusiasts can access a host of settings offered by Windows 11 (and the older Windows 10) that help smoothen in-game performance and buff frame rate output.

A Windows PC is currently the best platform for hard-core gaming experiences, allowing users to bring together high-level processors and graphic cards and build impeccable machines that can tackle the most graphically-intensive titles with ease. Consoles and other gaming platforms cannot provide such versatility just yet.

To help gamers optimize their PC for the best gaming experience, the next section of the article features a guide to tweaking some powerful Windows settings in favor of in-game performance.

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Follow these tips to enhance your gaming experience on a Windows PC

First and foremost, make sure to go through the video game’s internal settings and choose values according to your rig’s features. If you own a low-end machine, chances are that a high in-game graphical setting will cause lags and stuttering beyond plausibility.

Gamers often have to decide whether to favor frame rates or video resolution. Choosing an advanced graphical option will hog the CPU’s potential to deliver frame rates. Generally, for first-person shooters, players require higher frame rates than better resolution. In this case, they prefer to reduce the video resolution to boost frame rates.

Once you have made sure of the in-game settings, here are the best tweaks you can make to optimize Windows for gaming:

1) Enable “Game Mode”

PC gamers can access a dedicated game mode that tunes the system’s performance accordingly. Open the Settings app, go to Gaming > Game mode, and toggle the button if it’s not enabled already.

This will help reduce system-related background activity and improve frame rates depending on the game and the machine.

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2) Tweak the graphics settings for the game

While in the Settings app, go to the Gaming tab and then click on Graphics. If you don’t see the option for Graphics here, navigate to System > Display > Graphics instead.

Here, click on Change default graphics settings and enable Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling and Variable refresh rate. If you played games in windowed mode, you can enable the Optimizations for windowed games option as well.

Return to the Graphics tab and look for the game you wish to optimize individually in the list below “Custom options for apps”. Click on it and select Options. Make sure that the graphics preference is set to High-performance. It is crucial if your machine features two graphics cards: integrated and discrete.

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3) Check your system’s display options

Your monitor’s refresh rate can be restricted to a lower frame rate. Open the Settings app and go to System > Display > Advanced display. Choose the highest refresh rate available. This will allow the monitor to deliver the highest refresh rate it can support.

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4) Disable the Enhance Pointer Precision option (or mouse acceleration)

Accurate mouse tracking plays an important role in competitive video games, especially shooters. However, the Enhance Pointer Precision feature can prevent you from developing precise movements. Hence, players usually disable it.

Open the Settings app and go to Devices > Mouse > Additional Mouse Options. On Windows 11, you can find the Additional mouse settings option under Bluetooth & Devices > Mouse. Here, uncheck the box beside Enhance Pointer Precision.

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5) Update graphics drivers and Windows

It’s extremely important to keep your system’s software up-to-date to gain good in-game performance. Download the official software for your graphics card from the manufacturer’s website.

NVIDIA's Geforce Experience and AMD's Radeon software will regularly notify you regarding any available updates for graphics drivers.

Also, make sure to update the operating system as and when available. Keeping your system up-to-date will bring noticeable improvements to your gaming experience and prevent any notorious errors from popping up.

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While system and OS settings play a considerable role in gaming performance, the in-game settings you choose are more influential. Also, make sure to limit the number of background apps while gaming and get a stable network connection, preferably an ethernet line.