How to improve FPS without buying anything

Before spending money, work through this list. Several of these are free and give more than a hardware upgrade would.

Start here: the free wins

Enable your memory profile. XMP (Intel) or EXPO (AMD) is off by default on most motherboards, which means expensive memory runs at a slow JEDEC default. Enabling it in BIOS is a single toggle and, on Ryzen systems especially, can be worth a noticeable percentage.

Update your graphics drivers. Day-one drivers for major releases frequently include game-specific optimisations. This matters most in the weeks after a launch.

Check you are on the right GPU. On laptops, Windows sometimes runs a game on integrated graphics. Check Settings → System → Display → Graphics and set the game to High performance.

Check your power plan. Balanced can hold back boost clocks on some systems. On a desktop, High performance is worth testing.

Clean out dust. A thermally throttling GPU or CPU loses performance continuously, and it degrades gradually enough that people do not notice.

The settings that cost the most

Not all graphics settings are equal. Roughly ordered by cost-to-benefit:

1. Ray tracing / path tracing — by far the most expensive setting. Turning it off is usually the single largest gain available.
2. Shadow quality — consistently expensive and often barely noticeable in motion. Dropping from Ultra to High or Medium is usually free visually.
3. Volumetric fog / clouds — expensive, subtle.
4. Ambient occlusion — moderate cost, moderate benefit.
5. Anti-aliasing — cost depends heavily on the method.
6. Texture quality — nearly free if you have the VRAM. See how much VRAM you need.

Upscaling: the biggest single lever

DLSS (NVIDIA), FSR (AMD) and XeSS (Intel) render at a lower internal resolution and reconstruct the image. At Quality settings the visual cost is usually small and the frame rate gain substantial.

A few things worth knowing:

• Quality mode is the setting to start with. Performance mode is visible.
• Frame generation is different from upscaling. It inserts generated frames, which raises the frame counter but does not reduce input latency. It works best when your base frame rate is already reasonable.
• FSR and XeSS work on most hardware, including cards from other vendors, which makes them useful on older GPUs.

If you are stuttering rather than slow

Stutter and low frame rate are different problems with different causes:

• Shader compilation stutter — common in Unreal Engine titles, usually on first playthrough of an area. Some games offer a pre-compilation step; use it.
• Traversal stutter — the game streaming assets. An SSD helps; more VRAM helps.
• Running out of VRAM — lower textures.
• Background processes — check Task Manager while playing.

Finally

Once you know which component is actually limiting you, our upgrade suggestions point at the component that would help rather than at whatever is newest.