As someone who's spent literally thousands of hours competing in esports like Counter-Strike, I understand as well as anyone that high framerates are paramount. Having a high refresh rate monitor and great peripherals means nothing if your system isn't churning out hundreds of frames a second. While it's not my first choice for productivity, I still daily-drive Windows because I still play a lot of fast-paced FPS games that require kernel anti-cheats in my free time, and I've found that these 6 tweaks make a big difference to ensuring consistently high framerates during gameplay.

Disabling fullscreen optimizations

Can cause input delay, at a cost

While other tweaks in this article are going to give a bump in pure FPS, this one is all about frame pacing and overall smoothness. "Disable fullscreen optimizations" is a toggle for executables in Windows that was added in an attempt to make fullscreen apps behave more like borderless windowed ones. This is great for more casual games, but causes frametime issues when you're aiming for consistent, uber-high framerates.

To disable them, find your game's executable file and right click on it. Then, navigate to Properties, and under Compatibility, tick the box that says "Disable fullscreen optimizations".

While this will make things like alt-tabbing and overlays a bit worse, it will help with overall consistency of framerate, leading to a much smoother experience.

Full GPU driver reinstall using DDU

Updating isn't enough

Depending on how fresh your Windows install is, you might have remnants of old GPU drivers kicking around, which can cause performance issues. Or perhaps, maybe a recent driver update borked your performance in a specific title, and you'd like to rollback.

The best way to ensure either issue is solved completely is by using DDU, or Display Driver Uninstaller. This will completely wipe your system of any past and present GPU drivers, and allow you to perform a completely fresh installation of the driver version of your choosing.

Using MSI Afterburner + RTSS for framerate limiting

In-game limiters can cause added latency

While unlimited framerates might sound like a good idea, they can introduce much more drastic shifts in performance, and these peaks and valleys can make your game feel significantly worse, even if your framerate floor remains high. The easiest way to mitigate this is with the in-game framerate limiter, which most games should have, but this actually introduces latency in some cases, even if you're not using V-Sync.

RTSS, or RivaTuner Statistics Server, is an application that comes bundled with MSI Afterburner. When installed, you can add the game of your choosing and limit its framerate externally, instead of relying on the in-game limiter. You can also just install it on its own, without Afterburner, but Afterburner does allow you to tweak things like the power limit on your GPU, which can boost performance further. I've set my max FPS for Counter-Strike 2 to 300, since I can consistently hit that framerate in-game, and it's well over my monitor's refresh rate. I don't normally fall below that number, so I shouldn't really feel any inconsistencies in performance.

Disabling all overlays

Discord, Nvidia, Game Bar, all of them have to go

Personally, I find overlays more of an annoyance than anything, but I can see the appeal in having easy access to settings, voice calls, and other social features. Having them on also has a significant performance impact, especially the heavier ones like Discord. They can hook directly into DirectX/Vulkan pipelines, which can add performance overhead. Disabling these can be done in each app's respective settings, and I really only use Steam's overlay these days.

Disabling visual effects in Windows

Every little bit counts

While this might make your Windows UI look a lot more barebones, it can help lessen the burden significantly on lower-end hardware, and squeeze a bit more performance out of higher end machines. Windows animations, as pretty as they are, do take up some GPU cycles, which can affect latency. It's not a huge amount, but it does add up.

To turn off visual effects, navigate to System, then look for Advanced system settings. Click on the Advanced tab and open the Performance settings. Clicking on the "Adjust for best performance" radio button will turn off pretty much all the extra visual effects for Windows.

Turn on Game Mode

It's quite good

Many users think Game Mode will outright increase their FPS, and while it might do that indirectly, what it actually does is more important. Game Mode actually stops Windows from downloading and installing updates in the background, and prioritizes system resources to whatever game you have opened. It's not going to work any miracles for an optimized rig, but you should definitely have it on.

These help my system stay sharp

Not every gamer will notice the difference each of these changes makes on their own, but stacked together they add up to a much more consistent experience. The beauty is that they’re all relatively easy to try, with no registry hacking or overclocks required. If you’re someone who takes competitive play seriously, or you just want your system to run as lean and smooth as possible, these six tweaks are a solid foundation for a faster Windows gaming setup.