Welcome back, in today’s video I’ll be showing you a variety of different ways to
make your games look better on a Windows 10 PC or laptop.
Of course, I’m not a magician so you probably won’t notice a massive difference and you
may have tried some of the methods already so feel free to skip ahead if you come across
something you’ve done already.
What we’ll be focusing on in the video is first some of the settings in Windows 10 and
on the game and then we’ll look at ways to improve the visual elements as well as
ways to counter the negative impact on framerate and performance.
Remember to leave a like and feel free to subscribe if the video helps, let’s get
into the methods.
The best place to start is within the game you want to improve the quality of.
As every game is different, it’s difficult to guide you exactly but if you open up the
settings and then look for graphics or quality settings, you should be in the right place.
First look for an option called resolution; you want this to match what your monitor is
displaying at for the best possible quality.
If you aren’t sure what resolution that is, you can find out in the display settings
in Windows 10.
To get there, first go to the main settings page.
You can get there by clicking on the cog icon within the start menu.
In the settings, click on system.
In the system settings, click on display from the options on the left side although you
should be in there by default.
You’ll see the resolution in here.
I do have a separate video you might find useful.
That will show you all of the settings in here and give an overview on what they do.
Click the card onscreen now to watch that video.
Back in the game settings you first might need to change the resolution again if you
changed it in the Windows settings.
Most of the other quality settings are up to you, but of course for the purpose of this
video, our aim is to increase the quality without affecting performance.
Try increasing some of the graphics quality settings, for example from medium to high
or high to ultra.
Other useful settings include V-sync or a maximum frame rate setting.
This tries to stabilize the frames per second to the chosen amount.
If you turn this on and make the amount just above your monitors refresh rate, you should
be able to increase the quality of the game whilst barely noticing the change in frame
rate.
Settings like this will need a bit of trial and error to find the best choice, and it
might not be best in some situations.
You might also want to look for a setting called DLSS or AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution
or whatever they end up calling it as it’s not yet released.
These settings use super sampling to upscale the resolution of the game.
This will allow you to effectively run the game at a lower resolution without much visual
difference.
The savings in performance will allow you to increase the quality of some of the effects
in the game.
Make sure you save your graphics settings, and I strongly recommend having a play around
to see what works best, or even look online for optimised settings for your specific game.
Some games will require you to restart the game before the settings changes can be implemented.
Now that we have increased some of the quality settings within the game, we now need to focus
on how to reduce the impact on the framerate.
I have a number of methods that should help with this.
The first method is to turn off start up apps as well as close background apps.
Apps that run at start-up will cause your PC and games to run slower.
Turning off these programs will free up memory for your games and reduce the load on your
hardware.
We’ll start by disabling apps from running at start up.
To do this the first thing we need to do is go to the task manager.
You can access the task manager by right clicking on the taskbar at the bottom of your screen.
In the task manager, find the tab called start up, it should be the fourth option and click
on it to show the list of all the applications that can start up when you turn on your PC.
You’ll need to go down the list and look for any programs you know you don’t use,
or those that you don’t use regularly.
Disabling them in here won’t make them stop working, however they might take a bit longer
to run when you do want to use them.
But of course, if you don’t use them that often, this won’t make too much difference.
To disable an application in here, all you need to do is right click on it and then choose
‘disable’.
It’s helpful to look at the start up impact column to help make your decision on whether
it’s worth disabling them.
You can always enable the program again by right clicking on it and selecting enable.
To now disable background apps, find the small up arrow towards the right side of the taskbar
and if you click on it, you’ll see some of the apps that are currently running in
the background.
Choose a program that you don’t use and right click on it.
Click on close or exit for any of the apps you aren’t using to close them fully.
This should free up hardware resources to be used for the performance of the game.
The next method is to make sure your graphics card drivers are up to date.
Out of date drivers can cause compatibility issues with the latest games as well as performance
drops.
I have a separate video that will show you how to update your graphics card drivers on
a Windows 10 PC or laptop, no matter what graphics card you have, whether its nVidia,
AMD or Intel.
Click the card onscreen now to watch that video.
The next thing we can try is to free up drive space, this should especially help if your
drive is near capacity.
The easiest way to do this is to first go to the settings page which can be accessed
by clicking the cog icon within the start menu.
Now go to system and then choose storage from the options on the left.
Turn on storage sense at the top if it isn’t already and now click on the blue “configure
storage sense or run it now” link below this to open the settings.
You can change the frequency that storage sense will run at the top, feel free to make
this whatever you want depending on your situation.
If you want, you can check the box below this to delete any temporary files and set it to
delete files that have been in your recycle bin and downloads folder for over 30 days.
If you’re confident you don’t need any of these files, then you can run storage sense
now by clicking on the clean now button at the bottom.
You can also free up space by searching for disk clean-up and running this tool by checking
the boxes of the files you are happy to delete.
Please double check though to avoid removing anything you want to keep.
The next method is to download and install a game booster, game boosters should help
optimise your PC for gaming and that could improve performance.
I’ll leave a link to Razer Cortex in the description, which is a popular game booster.
There are others available so have a look around and see which you think might help
you the best.
There should be installation instructions on the website of the game booster you use.
Next, we can try and change the power plan of your PC.
If you have never changed this in the past, it’s likely that your power mode will be
set to balanced but we can change it to high performance.
Of course, this will use more power, but if you’re happy with that it’s not too difficult
to change.
First go to the control panel, you can get there by searching for it in the search bar.
In the control panel, click on system and security.
Now look down the list for the category called power options and click on that.
Look for high performance, and if you don’t see it, you might need to click on the arrow
to show additional plans.
Check the box next to high performance to turn it on and remember you might want to
change back to balanced when not playing games to save power.
Another method to try is to physically clean your PC.
Try and increase ventilation to allow your computer to run cooler.
If your PC can run cooler, it will be more efficient when trying to run your games and
won’t thermal throttle as often.
And so those are my methods to make games look better on a Windows 10 PC or laptop.
You could of course upgrade your hardware, but hopefully these methods will allow you
to improve performance and visual quality for free.
Click the card on screen now to watch a video of mine showing you ten easy ways you can
speed up your Windows 10 PC.
We’ve already done some of those methods in today’s video so you should be able to
zoom through that one for even more performance.
Help support the channel by visiting the store – the link is in the description and at
the end of the video.
If you have any questions, then let me know in the comments below and if you did find
today’s video helpful remember to leave a like and feel free to subscribe for more
tips in the future.
Be sure to stick around to see some of my other videos that you might be interested
in.
Thanks so much for watching and I will see you in another video!