The first thing we recommend doing to squeeze a little performance out of an aging card is to experiment with game settings themselves.

The guide is written generally because the knobs and dials vary from game to game, but it should be possible to improve performance in any game, at least a little. You may find that you like some solutions more than others, or that some harm image quality much more than you recover in terms of performance. There are going to be trade-offs throughout this process. The goal of this article is to help you improve game frame rates without completely sacrificing quality. This is especially true if you are using an APU or other integrated graphics solution. While reducing detail settings will also help improve frame rates, cutting your output resolution will reduce pressure on both VRAM and the GPU core itself by giving it less work to do per frame. Third: When in doubt, try a lower resolution. Dust is an excellent insulator and older cards have no performance to spare in the first place. While unlikely to be a major slowdown cause, a GPU will throttle back its performance if it’s overheating. Second, make sure you’ve dusted both your GPU and CPU. With Windows 10, some games now only offer a borderless fullscreen mode, and not every game shows a performance advantage for fullscreen versus borderless/windowed, but always check this setting if you’re trying to maximize performance. Windowed modes are sometimes slower than fullscreen because the GPU keeps drawing the desktop behind the game even when you can’t see it. If you’re in windowed mode, try switching to fullscreen to see if performance improves. Three miscellaneous tips before we start: First, check to see if you’re running in windowed mode or fullscreen mode.

Second, because every game is different, some of these tips may be more or less effective depending on the title.

Performance tuning can improve frame rates and turn a game that’s chugging in places into one that runs noticeably and meaningfully better, but there’s no way to turn an R9 290X or GeForce GTX 980 into a Radeon 6800 XT or RTX 3080. First, the tweaks we’ll explore, even taken in aggregate, will certainly help but are unlikely to work miracles. Before we kick off, a few caveats are in order.

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