All gaming is fun, but PC gaming isn’t always as simple as console gaming. Without optimizing your PC, a lot of your gaming will be compromised, particularly as pertains to speed. Technically, the whole optimization process can be a daunting task especially if you are not familiar with the internal hardware, operating system and overall configuration of your PC. Lucky for you, here is a look at some of the ways you can optimize your PC for your online games to be better than they are:
Follow the minimum requirement by developers
Most developers publish a set of minimum and recommended system requirements. These are the standards that outline the type of hardware within which a PC is required to be at, for the game to run effectively. Before any other adjustments on your PC, make sure they meet the minimum system requirements because there is no way around it.
Know Your PC Hardware
You have to know what you are working with for you to tweak it to your convenience effectively. To get the most out of your PC, do not just work to ensure it has the minimum gaming requirements. Make sure you supersede the demands by following through with the recommended hardware by the developer. If particularly you purchased an off the shelf gaming PC, then you need to learn about the hardware installed before initializing the configuration process. Before you can consider procuring gaming accessories including a gaming chair and the best gaming headsets, have a proper grasp of the hardware installed, along with the CPU and Graphics cards.
Update Graphics Drivers
As a gamer, make it your primary concern to ensure that your graphics cards are updated with the latest drivers at all times. This is because the graphics cards are the focal point of your entire PC gaming experience. You can even optimize the graphics card frame rate for performance increases.
Clean Your Startup and Shutdown Unnecessary Processes
For the fastest and most efficient plays, you need your Pc wholly dedicated to playing the game. Considering that the longer you have your PC, the more applications you are likely to install, background tasks can take up considerable system resources without our knowledge. This necessitates that you shut down any processes that might be running in the background of your computer. This also includes cleaning up your startup. It is also very wise to always start gaming on a freshly booted PC. You can then decide to kill random processes in windows task manager, which is the easiest way to stop applications from running when you play.
Defrag your Hard Drive
Capacity and disk fragmentation are both reasons that could cause your hard drive to slow down the gaming process. Technically, you cannot allow your disk storage space to get to around 90-95% of capacity. Since gaming is a process that is memory intensive, it capitalizes on the virtual memory which is temporary space on an HDD. If you do not want to spend money investing in more cloud storage space or in getting a new hard drive, then try cleaning out temporary internet files, windows files, and programs that you no longer use.
You can use the basic windows tool defragmenter or rely on a third-party application such as Defraggler.
Pro tip: Disk defragmentation should not be performed on SSDs.
Upgrade Hardware
If things are not still going well after all your optimization efforts, it might be time to upgrade your hardware. Other than the CPU and Motherboard, most of the hardware in a PC can be replaced or upgraded. The main upgrades to consider for your hardware are the hard drive, graphics card, and RAM. When your RAM is notably lower than the minimum standards of developers, you definitely require an upgrade.
Other than adding the RAM for your Pc, you can increase its speed to boost performance. This can be by purchasing new faster RAM or by overclocking. However, be careful when trying to rid your PC from stuttering, because more space with the same speed is better than a fast speed at the same speed.