Improve Your Video Card's Gaming Speed Without Replacing It

Sometimes, you can't afford to buy the latest and the greatest when it comes to video cards and your Rest Your Eyes When Gaming. This article will help to improve your performance.

Steps

  1. Lower the resolution. This will help your game move at a more productive speed.
  2. Turn off or reduce advanced visual features of your game. Some of these that might significantly improve performance are shutting down DirectX 10 features.
  3. Reduce, or eliminate, the games anti-aliasing level. Yeah, the edges will be jagged, but your CPU will love you for it!
  4. Reduce the level of anisotropic filtering. What this does is reduce the quality of textures in the game that are viewed at an oblique level.
  5. If you can, try switching from high dynamic range lighting to bloom lighting.
  6. Try updating your DirectX software as new updates can increase the performance of your graphics card.
  7. Overclock. Download your graphics card manufacturer's overclocking utility. Increase the core and memory clock speeds by 5-10% depending on the card.
    • Note: This does come with some risk and is not recommended for integrated chipsets or graphics solutions without effective cooling systems.



Tips

  • If you are experiencing choppy gameplay, try closing out of unnecessary processes using the task manager (ctrl+alt+del) (processes tab). This may speed up your whole computer, but it won't help your video card. Then, and find your game's process tab and right click on it, go to Set Priority, choose High (only available on Windows 7 & lower). If, for some reason, you get an error because you have to run your game in administrator mode, you can click on Show All Processes located in the lower lefthand corner of the task manager. That will give you administrator privileges with task manager to do whatever you want. Just find the process button and repeat.
  • Try downloading the latest driver for your video card, from either the manufacturer's website or the disk that came with the video card may come with some sort of application center where you can download the newest driver with ease. (Alternatively, if you don't have the knowledge, are scared to follow any of these methods, or cannot obtain it by the methods listed, you could alternatively look for a driver updater online that could do it all for you. Instance Steam™ has a feature where they will identify your video card, look for the newest drivers, and install them all without you really ever having to lift a finger.)
  • Try lowering your Windows Aero™ settings; this may increase computer performance.
  • If you are running an Intel Integrated graphics chip or low-end AMD/Nvidia card, turn screen resolutions down in-game as this can sometimes nearly double the frames per second (FPS) you are getting in-game.

Warnings

  • Closing out of system processes could leave your computer in a state where it has to reboot. (Most of the time, the system gives you a warning and allows you one minute to save all documents needed so that loss of data does not occur).

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  • The idea for this article came from the July Issue of MaximumPC.
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