Everyone wants faster, smoother systems and graphics right?
No matter what hardware you have, here are some top tips of how to maximize the performance of your gaming rig for free.
Clean your rig!
Perhaps the simplest thing you can do is clean the dust out from your case, filters, fans, GPU and CPU cooler fins, etc and try to make sure that the airflow around your machine is good (definitely no old socks lodged up against the PSU vents either! – true story, you know who you are).
Heat is the enemy of electrical components like CPUs, GPUs, PSUs and motherboard chipsets, etc – so not only will cleaning the dust out and maximizing airflow make them last longer, it will also stop your computer from doing any “thermal throttling” whilst you are gaming. Simply, thermal throttling means that in order to stop components overheating and burning out, your computer monitors them and slows them down when they are getting too hot. The end result being that you lose system performance and FPS whilst gaming if things.
Stop all unnecessary apps and services
This can be done manually or by using “game boost” type tools often provided by motherboard manufacturers, similar tools are also kicking around for free.
Essentially you should be aiming to stop all the running apps, processes and services running in the background that are not necessary for your current gaming needs.
Obviously be careful here and with the next suggestion – stop only things you know you can safely stop … best rule of thumb, if you don’t know what it is, leave it alone.
Stop X-Box, Nvidia and other gaming overlays
Open anything like Windows X-Box Game Bar or Nvidia GeForce Experience – go to settings and disable in-game overlays, “game capture in the background” or anything similar to this on any other (AMD?) overlays and … that is of course as long as you do not need them!
EDIT: I don’t record or stream so I also recently uninstalled Nividia GeForce Experience as I felt it was causing various issues. To support this I also saw this as a recommendation in iRacing’s support pages.
Edit startup tasks
So many apps that you install start themselves up automatically as windows boots, Adobe products love to do this as do many hardware manufacturers… if you know what things are and you don’t want them slowing down your system at boot or lurking in the background afterwards until you actually need them, then go into task manager, click on the “startup” tab, right click anything that you don’t want to start at boot and disable it there. Obviously this will only take effect on the next reboot.
Network traffic optimisers
Network traffic can have a big affect on what you see and game lag.
Similar to game boosters, manufacturers such as Asus often provide tools to help maximise gaming data throughput on your local machine. Essentially these prioritise game data packets and stop other apps like OneDrive from hogging network bandwidth whilst you are gaming and its a good idea to kill such apps whilst you are gaming.
Windows also has a “game mode” which stops windows update and other tasks running in the background whilst you are gaming, so it would seem a no brainer to enable this.
Quality of Service (QoS) – routers
Many routers have QoS which comes in several “flavours” … so if you have several people or devices on your network, these can often help by optimising throughput for network traffic, eg “gaming mode” detects gaming packets and prioritises their throughput, more traditional “bandwidth limiters” do what they suggest, limit the amount of bandwidth available to any machine – so if you have a device streaming TV and it is using all your internet bandwidth, then you can lock that device down so it only uses a certain amount of bandwidth and leaves enough available for gaming.
Unplug non-essential USB devices and other hardware.
Devices that are plugged in can increase the amount of processing and wait time or system interrupts – each device essentially occasionally says “I’m here” even if you are not using it. Unplug unused devices and the devices you are using like mice, wheels and input controllers will have shorter wait times and fewer interruptions from devices such as webcams or whatever else that you may not be using (also a good idea to unplug webcams etc if you are worried about big brother or hackers). This may or may not make a material difference, however especially older devices and/or Bluetooth devices can be the cause of stutters, conflicts and larger issues.
Be careful what USB devices you plug in to where
USB is essentially a daisy chain system where up to 127 devices can be connected to one port. The more devices sharing one “chain” or port (eg via a USB hub), the more time each will have to wait or more interruptions from other devices on that same chain.
I always plug my wheel, pedals, keyboard and mouse directly into the back of my PC, and not in to a USB hub in order to minimise potential lag or conflicts from sharing bandwidth with other devices.
Non-essential or “lag critical” devices I happily plug in via USB hubs, however you have to be careful as some USB hubs and devices don’t play well together, causing conflicts, or even long interrupts which will can cause graphics to stutter or “spool”.
Check Windows Device Manager for conflicts or missing drivers
A quick look in windows Device Manager will show you any devices that are not installed or working properly (exclamation mark against them)
quick ways to to start device manager: right click “This PC” on your desktop or in Windows Explorer >> Manage >> Device Manager -or- right click the Windows Start button >> Run >> devmgmt.msc
Best rules of thumb for optimal performance… keep Windows and motherboard / manufucturer’s device drivers updated to their latest versions, this includes BIOS versions and software. Beta versions might offer performance boosts etc but may be flakey and create instability or unwanted issues – so use those with caution.
Optimised in-game graphics settings
Obvious but you will find huge benefits from spending a little time testing graphics and optimising them for your machine.
Tools like Nvidia’s GeForce Experience can help get you some base settings, however each machine is different and tweaking and testing how each setting affects your system will help.
Load distribution
Most gaming rigs have several hard disks and/or SSDs. Optimise the location of your installations and you will see faster load times and other performance benefits.
The basic concept here is to spread the work across components where possible so that one device is not doing all the work and the others sat around idle.
A couple of suggestions:
- install games on different drives to where your operating system is installed.
- SSDs are way faster in terms of disk reads and writes, so can be useful for faster load times etc, however SSDs degrade faster than standard HDDs so if you write lots of logs, telemetry or similar data to disk, then you may want to try using a HDD rather than SSD for this.
- Google “symbolic links” to find out how to “move” a directory to another drive / location
GPU or CPU Bound or something else?
Some in game graphics settings add more CPU load, others will add GPU load.
Knowing if your CPU or GPU is the bottleneck or something else like hitting memory limits can help you tune your system and settings better.
Also check the load based on the threads and cores in your system using things like windows performance monitor – some games are better optimised for distributing load across all the cores on your CPU than others, sometimes you can influence this, sometimes not. For example, if one CPU core is consistently being overloaded and others are under utilised then you might consider trying to set the “core affinity” to move the load on to other cores (Google it).
Overclocking GPU , CPU, Fan Speed Control, XMP, etc
There are lots of ways you can safely boost performance with a little bit of system tweaking and optimisation.
- Overclocking of CPUs and motherboards are not such a heady task as they once were – most gaming motherboard manufacturers provide some simple way of overclocking your system and CPU at minimal risk.
- Enable XMP (memory) – eXtended Memory Profiles are optimised memory profiles created by hardware manufacturers to help make your system run as fast and stable as possible. If you have the ability to enable this in Bios or overclocking tools, then doing so should help safely boost system performance.
- GPU overclocking can be easily be done with things like Riva Tuner or slightly enhanced tools based on it such MSI Afterburner, which works with any GPU brand. You can find similar tools such as EVGA Precision X1 and others from Asus, etc to do a similar job. With these you can run automated tests to set optimal stable settings for both your GPU core and memory clocks. Enabling them at boot will ensure they are always set, or manually triggering them yourself when starting gaming will reduce power
- Fan speed – Riva Tuner, Afterburner and some motherboard, CPU cooler manufacturers provide the ability to tweak your fan speeds. Why is this of interest? Because as I said at the beginning of this article, heat is not good for the longevity of components and thermal throttling will occur if your system is running too hot. On the flip side, whilst reading this article you don’t want to have your fans running at 100% and deafening you. Thus tweaking fan speeds to run faster and keep your rig cool whilst gaming, then stay quiet whilst surfing or watching videos is the way to go.
iRacing specific settings
Max Cars – Setting this to any more than 20 on one machine I recently optimised had a huge negative affect on in game graphics.
Seems that if you are CPU bound, or more specifically if one core is being overloaded as was happening on this particular machine (intel i5 10400F at ~4Ghz), then despite hitting constant 140fps and render times being around 10ms, there was a long lag or stuttering like looping of the graphics when Max Cars was set to 63. Any setting higher than 20 on this machine started to induce this effect.
Disable “full screen optimisations” in Windows for iRacing – this improves overall performance in my experience in both single and triple view. This also helps with stuttering issues and keeps the monitors in sync with each other – with this disabled, bouncing over curbs caused the side monitors to be out of sync with center monitor)
To do this, go to C:\Program Files (x86)\iRacing (or wherever you installed iRacing)
Right click iRacingSim64DX11.exe and select properties, then select “Disable full-screen optimisations” as per following screen shot.
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