Most people who’ve been on the Internet a while will have at least heard of the term FPS, if not directly dealt with it while playing PC games or doing anything to do with videos.
FPS simply means Frames Per Seconds and it determines the fluidity of the motion of visuals and how aesthetically connected your game feels and looks.
Since any video is essentially just still visuals rapidly displaying one after another (which is how the very nature of vision can be described as well), it means that your FPS settings would be to blame if you find your game unplayable.
Simply put, high FPS translates to smoother gameplay. How to increase FPS is a natural follow-up question, and what makes for a good level of FPS are factors such as your monitor/display, hardware (such as graphics card and drivers), and other techniques such as optimizing your PC by overclocking it.
The Tradeoff Between FPS and GPU Load
You might already have intuited that more frames per second would mean more work for your system. This connects to what you’ve read a few paragraphs ago, about unplayable games. When the GPU can’t keep up with the FPS, you start to notice a lag.
Without going too much into the technical details of what’s happening behind the screens, let’s then look at simple techniques on how to increase FPS. One thing to remember is that it’s not really FPS that influences your computer usage and storage, but vice versa.
How to Increase FPS: The Basics
The ground rules of any science stay the same while the applicable consequences expand and widen. It’s the same with graphics and technology.
Update Your Graphics Drivers
This might perhaps be the first place you should start. You can update your graphics drivers by first figuring out which video card you have installed.
You can do this by checking your display adapter in Device Management on a Windows system, or simply installing a tool that updates all your drivers automatically. (On a Mac, you should read what it says about Graphics in the More Info section of About This Mac). In both cases, you can then simply go over to the company’s website to download the latest driver.
A word of caution: the company here would be something like Intel or AMD, not the manufacturers of the specific card (such as ASUS or MSI).
Simply updating your drivers can have a massive impact on performance, such as this NVIDIA update back in 2012 that made Skyrim perform a whopping 45% better.
Adjust Your Performance for the Best Setting
It seems deceptively simple, but it’s entirely possible that your problems could be caused by a case of the computer simply having the wrong option checked.
Yes, you can go to the Windows Control Panel and head on over to System and Security. In System, go to Advanced system settings, and in the new window that opens, go to the tab that simply says Advanced.
Once here, click on the Settings button under Performance, and then simply check ‘Adjust for best performance’. Now, let your expertly created computer system do the actual computing for you.
(You can also go to Power options in the Control Panel and set your power plan to ‘High performance’ before you do this. It might be hidden under ‘additional plans’.)
Overclock Your CPU
Alright, maybe this one isn’t as ‘basic’ as the last two, but you might have noticed that these tips are essentially designed to follow a troubleshooting pattern. If these last two steps didn’t do it for you, it’s time to ramp up the optimization.
Overclocking, as described in this article, starts with benchmarking and stress-testing, letting you know how much your CPU can take, and how far to the limit it can be pushed.
The greatest impact can be had by tweaking the CPU. There’s an option to overclock the GPU in most video card drivers itself (by launching the interface from the Notifications area), but you can also head over to your system’s BIOS for overclocking the CPU and RAM, which is much easier.
In either case, make sure you follow an online guide, preferably to the letter, since this is something for avid gamers and anything less than the careful precision of a gamer might compromise your system way worse, with the least of your problems being overheating.
How to Increase FPS in League of Legends
Now that you’re well-versed with the basics, let’s get specific.
Changing the in-game settings should be your first course of action whether it’s this you’re playing or if you’re looking for advice on how to increase FPS in Fortnite or how to increase FPS in PUBG.
In LOL, hitting the Esc key can lead you to the VIDEO option. Here you can turn Character Quality, Shadows, and Effect Quality and other Graphics to a lower resolution. Play around a bit to see what works while keeping your game high-quality and your computer unburdened.
It’s also possible when it comes to League of Legends, very specifically, that the game files have been corrupted over time. Luckily, you can Initiate Full Repair from within the Settings.
How to Increase FPS in Overwatch
Here’s a fun one: don’t fully exit the game, and head over to Task Manager. In the Processes tab, find Overwatch, right-click, and set the game’s Priority to high and in real-time. This would mean higher processing power specifically dedicated to Overwatch, resulting in a direct improvement in all aspects including FPS.
This can, of course, be applied to other problems as well. If you’re asking how to increase FPS in Minecraft, for example, this is one easy way. However, if you want to get more specific, here’s some recommended Settings for Overwatch, as the possibilities are way more than the ones we discussed in League of Legends.
- V-Sync: Off
- Triple Buffering: Off
- Reduce Buffering: On
- Graphics Quality: Low
- Render Scale: 100% (lowering this will simply make your game look atrociously bad)
- Texture Quality: Low
- Local Fog Detail: Low
- Dynamic Reflections: Off
- Shadow Detail: Off
- Model Detail: Low
- Effects Detail: Low
- Lighting Quality: Low
- Refraction Quality: Low
- Screenshot Quality: 1x Resolution
- Ambient Occlusion: Off
Note that this is pretty much for extreme cases, and your experience will be hampered if you do decide to use these settings. However, you should see a noticeable boost in your FPS.
How to Increase FPS for NVIDIA Users
If you’re using NVIDIA, here are some tips for anything from how to increase the FPS in CS:GO or practically any game you could think of.
Head over to the Control Panel and pay special attention to two factors: turn off shader cache, and in Manage 3D Settings, set the Power Management Mode to prefer maximum performance. While there are numerous other settings that you can tweak in your Nvidia Control Panel, we recommend letting your applications decide individual settings so as to have higher control over your games.
In the end, some games will not require you to lower your settings as much as others. Just because you can’t sustain 60 FPS in Witcher 3 does not mean you cannot do the same in League of Legends. Because of this, try not to change a lot of settings in your Nvidia Control Panel as they could hamper your ability to enjoy gaming.
Conclusion
Apart from upgrading your gaming rig, these are some of the best tips on how to increase FPS. Even if you get specific or if you just want better graphics overall, most of these can be easily applied by any gamer, and most of these will help you regardless of the specific situation you’re in.
