Bananagaming posted about a potential FPS boost. So, can GameBoostHD help to make Counter
Strike run faster? Your PC has to handle a lot of stuff at the
same time. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Task Manager, Details and you’ll see them all, running
away. It’s possible that some of these could be interfering with Counter-Strike’s framerate!
Right-click on them and you can change their priority, which effectively makes them more
or less important than everything else your PC is currently doing. Don’t go and give
them all low and Counter-Strike high: that could cause system instabilities. Instead…
leave this to gameboost. When it spots you in a supported game, it
will automatically adjust some of the most common background programs- you can see them
here, on Gameboost’s site. I had a look on my own system at which priorities
were changed and it wasn’t that extensive: Chrome was set to low, as was Steam and Origin,
though interestingly, Origin was already low for me. And, bless its heart, Gameboost sets
its own importance to below normal. Aww. As well as altering priorities, it also disables
power saving modes. So in short, it doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do yourself
in a couple of minutes. It’s just a nice, convenient and automated way of doing it,
reserved for when you’re playing games. BUT DOES IT MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
I benchmarked my fast Ryzen 1800X PC and my friend’s recently bought 2200G system. These
conveniently represent high and low-end gaming rigs.
At graphics card-limited settings, it didn’t change the minimum framerates at all. On the
slower PC, only the maximum framerate changed and that was by less than 2%. But on my powerful
PC, the same thing happened to the maximum framerate, AND I saw an extra 5 FPS average.
Which is an improvement of like, 3%! These changes are VERY small, even within the margin
of error, but I did test each setting twice, on a PC that was freshly booted each time,
and I got the same results both times on these settings. To avoid giving such a small improvement
credibility I’ll just say that it isn’t enough to change things enough to worry about,
and I’ll move on to my second test. This second test was done in a more processor-bound
scenario. The slower PC’s only interesting results were with the lowest 1% and .1%...
the latter of which improved by over 10%! Which sounds great, until you realise that’s
an improvement of… 2 FPS. You know when a game stutters once every minute or so? Yeah,
that’s the sort of thing a .1 percentile result would show. Maybe it had to load some
new information. Or MAYBE, just maybe, Origin suddenly thought it was more important than
your game and stole some valuable processing time. With Gameboost setting background tasks
to low priority, it should hopefully reduce these kinds of interruptions.
But these results are only made up of the average of 2 runs- so I decided to give them
all another 2 runs each to see if the results would be different… and they were. I think
we’ve just got to accept that minimum framerate drops in CS:GO are severe, but also rare and
unpredictable in size. Any changes here are likely not from gameboost.
As for my powerful PC, this saw improvements in all areas apart from maximum framerates!
But I ran these all again twice more and once again got different results, so… let’s
move on to the final test that I did. Gameboost sets things in the background to
low priority. The reason it hasn’t made much of a difference so far is because I don’t
have anything in the background that’s misbehaving. So what if I did? While I was running the
CS:GO benchmark, I also ran another benchmark… in Chrome!
What I hope to see happen is for the gameboost-enabled runs to be faster, perhaps even reaching the
results achieved by the benchmarks where there wasn’t anything running in the background.
But alas, turns out that Windows is pretty good at keeping things in the background away
from important system resources without even needing them to be set to low priority.
On my powerful PC, the benchmark wasn’t enough to make much of a difference to my
framerate in the first place, and having gameboost enabled actually made CS:GO run SLOWER than
without it! And on my slower PC, the benchmark DID make
the game run substantially slower, but gameboost once again resulted in lower framerates…
but at least the average was a bit higher I guess. Not going to call that a victory,
though. All in all, I was hoping to find noticeable
differences from using Gameboost. Had I found something reasonably interesting then I would
have investigated in more depth, but I was already doing multiple tests on multiple PCs
at multiple settings… it becomes a pretty big undertaking fairly quickly. From what
I’ve found, I’m happy to dismiss every single variance I discovered as being down
to variances between runs, which seems to happen more in CPU-limited situations. And
with chrome running in the background, I suspect the variations between results was more from
there being 2 benchmarks running at the same time than it was from which application had
priority- which still didn’t seem to make much of a difference.
So should you avoid using Gameboost? NO! The program itself makes sense and I like what
it tries to do. The PCs I tested-aside from the weird pictures of 2kliksphilip I found-
were in good condition. And what few background programs were running seemed to behave themselves.
I suspect gameboost isn’t going to help improve a system that doesn’t have problems.
But if you’ve got a PC with a rogue instance of Chrome or Origin running in the background,
or poorly configured power settings, then Gameboost could actually improve things. Just
be aware that the programs it targets are limited. If you have a virus eating your framerates
then it’s not going to stop it. (UNLESS IT’S ORIGIN! HOHOHO.)
I suggest you do check gameboost out. It could help you. It’s a 7 KB download and is so
unintrusive when running that my biggest problem I had with it was in knowing if it was actually
running or not! In conclusion, Bananagaming was right. It’s a potential FPS boost, IF
the priority of your applications or power settings are wrong in the first place. If
your PC is running slower than it should be, then it’s worth trying, but it’s not a
miracle FPS-boost for everyone. I’m going along to the Faceit Major. If
any of you are going and see me, then say hi. I’ll keep Twitter updated with my whereabouts
as much as I can. If you’re not going then you can still watch the games on streaming
platforms and from CS:GO’s main page- the games will be going on until Sunday. Thank
you to the guys at Faceit for this opportunity. I’m hoping this will be a very successful
major.