6 Ways To Optimize Your Windows 10 PC For Gaming

If you do any gaming at all, you know how frustrating it can be sometimes to play your favorite titles on Windows 10. When the platform first launched, it was hardly friendly for gamers at all. But now, after some iterations, Microsoft has a few ways that you can make things much better for all types of games.

So if you follow along with us below, we’re going to show you at least six modifications that you can make within the windows 10 system to make your games play and run better.

Make sure your GPU driver is up to date

In the most basic terms, your video card works to display video content to your monitor. However, it does a whole lot more than this — it assists in game processing by helping render a variety of different aspects, like textures, particles, effects, async, and so, so much more. Many might not know this, but the software that comes loaded on your GPU heavily effects how the card will operate.

So you’ll always to make sure that your GPU driver is up to date. Windows 10 usually packages in driver updates automatically now, but you can double check manually by going into the Windows 10 Device Manager. When you’re there, right-click on your video card, and then press the Check For Updates button.

Disable Automatic Updates

To improve gaming performance, you’ll want to make sure that Windows 10 isn’t automatically downloading system updates. When Windows is doing this, it usually takes up a ton of system resources, including processor resources and the demand on your Internet connection.

That said, while you can’t actually download Automatic Updates, you can setup “Active Hours’ to tell Windows 10 when you’re almost always using your computer. It will then avoid downloading automatic updates during those hours, freeing up resources for your games.

You can adjust this by opening up Settings, and adjusting those hours within the Windows Update settings.

Adjust your power plan

Your Power Plan can have a lot to deal with how your computer operates. If you have it on a Balanced , your computer is going to adjust performance and system settings to save power. Usually your screen will dim, your processor slows down, and more.

To avoid this, you might want to open up your Power Plan, and then select the High Performance option. This can consume more power, but frees up your computer to devote more resources to gaming, giving you a better gaming experience.

Game Mode

Microsoft has actually included a built-in Game Mode that you can turn on for maximum gaming performance. Game Mode doesn’t necessarily have a huge impact on higher-end systems where you already have a lot of power, but does help low-end to mid-grade systems by focusing system resources on your gaming, instead of elsewhere.

Game Mode is another one that’s turned on within the Settings app in Windows 10. You can open Settings, and then simply search for Game Mode to navigate to the section for turning it on. Otherwise, select the Gaming section, click on the Game Mode subsection, and then toggle the Game Mode option to the On position.

Like we mentioned, as a rule, Game Mode isn’t useful for systems that already have a lot of extra resources — it’s more for low-end systems, or systems with a ton of background tasks happening.

Clean up your temp files and cache

One area of your computer that can really slow your system to a crawl is temp files and cached files. As these collect, they start taking up a ton of space, and can sometimes even start eating up memory and extra hard disk or SSD space that your computer needs to run efficiently. That said, you’ll want to clean these files up every so often.

To do so, you can use a free tool like CCleaner. This tool scans your computer for temp and cache files that you can dump, and then gives you the option to get rid of them. Temp and cache files are almost never needed again in the future, so it’s worth just getting rid of them to free up those system resources.

Restart your computer after the cleaning is done, and you should have new resources available for gaming.

Verdict

Even the layman can make most of these quick system changes within just a couple of minutes for better gaming performance. By following the different options above, you should be able to quickly and easily make these small adjustments to get your games running at optimal performance levels.

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