Whether gaming for sport or pure pleasure, PC gamers are unified by their need to have low latency gameplay at the highest frame rate possible.
At the very minimum, the sweet spot is 60 frames per second. Though games reaching for a more cinematic presentation may be fine with 30fps while serious competitor gamers may want something in the 120fps range or greater, 60fps is closer to how most monitors can present the smoothest visuals.
As visual fidelity in games reaches new heights, it can usually affect the smoothness of images, leading to frame rate drops or lower than standard performance.
This includes higher resolutions, newer rendering techniques like ray tracing and more that can weigh on components like the CPU or GPU.
Games from Alan Wake II and Cyberpunk 2077 to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 are stretching the bounds of video game visuals, while also pushing gaming rigs to the limit.
For those looking to get the most out of their gaming desktop or longtime PC gamers trying to extend their current setup until they can upgrade, here are some things that’ll help games reach 60fps performance.
Update the drivers and BIOS for your components
Beyond helping improve functionality, security and the like, updating drivers for your motherboard bios, CPU, and GPU can improve game performance significantly.
That’s because new drivers and motherboard BIOSs can enhance the speed and efficiency of hardware that’ll provide better system responsiveness, better frame rates, and even better load times for games.
If your game’s performance is on the wonky side, gameplay is interrupted by crashes, or the game won’t run at all, try updating those drivers before you do anything else.
Overclocking
Depending on the CPU and GPU, it might be a good idea to overclock components. This gives one’s PC gaming rig a bit more processing juice to work with for more demanding games.
Custom rig owners may have to work harder to safely push their hardware while many pre-builds come with software that’ll have standard overclocking settings. Understand that overclocking too far can lead to damaged components over time, so do so at your own risk.
Most of all, overclocking means increasing the voltage to components, so make sure you have a strong enough CPU cooler and enough system ventilation available to accommodate the increased heat these components generate.
Close unnecessary applications
A simple way to increase performance is to make sure background applications or unnecessary applications are closed before opening a game.
Some of these apps include browsers, anti-virus or anti-spyware programs, music or video streaming programs, download management applications, and more.
Closing those apps can free up system resources for better performance when playing games.
Make sure your game is updated
In the modern age of gaming, developers aren’t finished with a game once it’s been released. Many games get post-release updates that usually optimize performance, fix bugs, and add new functionality.
Though older (and newer) GPUs or CPUs may have some performance issues at launch, updates to the game over time may provide higher fps over time for your favorite games.
Read the system requirements for your games
System requirements are often provided by the game’s developer to inform users on what components are needed to run a game.
Usually, they fall between minimum and recommended requirements. Some developers will go further and provide requirements for playing games at certain resolutions and frame rate targets.
This means users can have full knowledge of what’s needed for 60fps at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K gaming before they even buy the game.
Having those targets in mind with your system specs handy means you can better target various graphic settings to acheive 60fps performance.
Turn down the native resolution
Speaking of graphic settings, a game’s native resolution is going to use a nice chunk of a GPU’s resources and VRAM.
For gaming, 8GB of VRAM is sufficient for 1080p, 12GB is ideal for 1440p, and 16GB is recommended for 4K.
Users who notice wonky performance issues while gaming may want to check the resolution settings to see if that might need to be bumped down, as this will have the biggest impact on increasing your framerates to 60fps.
Turn down in-game visual settings
Outside of native resolution, most PC games have dozens of visual settings that can be turned on and off or placed within the standard of ultra, high, medium, and low preset.
Games that may utilize more resource-intensive visual tricks like ray tracing may need this feature to be turned off, for example.
Then other things can be bumped down or up like texture quality, global illumination, shadow quality, lighting effects, post-processing, water effects, and others.
Turning many of these settings down can help boost frame rates to 60.
Use upscaling technology
One of the most useful technologies for improving 60fps performance is through the use of AI upscaling technology.
Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, and Intel’s XeSS can render a smaller resolution image and then use upscaling to expand it to a higher resolution while maintaining graphic fidelity, which often speeds up framerates.
If you’re barely getting 60fps out of a native 1440p or 4K image, try turning various upscaling options on.
Be mindful that upscaled images are pretty good, they may suffer from ghosting or artifacts at times, but for most, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Maybe it’s time for new components
Users who follow all of these steps and still can’t get 60fps performance may need to consider upgrading components, and especially their graphics card.
Take a look at our various guides for GPUs that fit all budgets alongside guides for CPUs and SSD drives if your hardware is still struggling to hit 60 fps on your favorite games, as no amount of settings tweaking will get your games to 60fps if your PC doesn’t meet a game’s minimum requirements.