Will A Graphics Card Improve FPS? (Top 10 Tips to Improve It)

Everyone wants to play games in the smoothest way possible. After all, what’s the purpose of playing a game if you can’t enjoy it?

Most people use graphics cards to meet this requirement. After all, GPUs do all of the graphical work on a computer. But will a graphics card improve the FPS?

Yes, a graphics card will definitely help you get more FPS. With more processing power, game objects like NPCs, scenes, and other things will be rendered properly. However, this is not always the case because there are other factors to consider.

Read on to learn more about GPUs and how they really affect FPS.

What Is FPS?

First, let’s figure out what FPS really means.

FPS stands for Frames Per Second. It is how many images are shown on your screen every second.

It works with film, video cameras, computer graphics, and motion capture. Frame rate is also called frame frequency. Most of the time, it is written as Hertz or Hz.

You may have heard that a display’s refresh rate is 60Hz. It means that the display can update itself 60 times per second, giving the viewer a smooth experience.

Why Should You Improve Your PC’s FPS?

As we’ll see later in this piece, FPS is one of the most crucial aspects of gaming and streaming. Everything on your screen looks smoother when the refresh rate is higher. It provides an enjoyable experience. Let’s look at some key benefits.

1. Pleasant to the Eyes

It’s also better for your eyes. Doctors say that computer screens should have a higher refresh rate. Given how much time you spend gazing at a computer screen, it’s important to provide your eyes with the best and most enjoyable experience possible. This can be done with higher FPS, which will also save your eyes in the long run.

2. Video Editing and Streaming

Certain programs, like video editing and streaming, require a high refresh rate. Video editing involves precise frame-by-frame adjustments. You can’t do this without a high enough FPS.

The same goes for streaming. If you’re a streamer, you don’t want your stream to be slow and have low frames per second (FPS). You will lose viewers, and the entire viewing experience will be poor.

All of this emphasizes the importance of a high FPS on a computer.

What’s The Standard FPS For Gaming and Streaming?

Having a minimum FPS level is essential for gaming and streaming. Let’s get in-depth on how many frames you should aim for when gaming and streaming on a PC.

1. Gaming

The gaming standard for FPS is 60. It is because most monitors run at 60 Hz. Anything over 60 fps wouldn’t be much helpful. But this is just the minimum, though.

If your FPS count reaches below this minimum, you’ll notice some problems while gaming. As a result of seeing fewer frames per second, the game may appear choppy. It will give you the feeling that everything is moving slowly.

To summarize, FPS improves the smoothness of your screen and provides a more enjoyable experience.

However, many displays today are much beyond 60 Hz, with some even reaching 120 or 144 Hz. After all, the gaming community always prefers higher refresh rates for the smoothest gameplay possible.

2. Streaming

When it comes to streaming, you can aim for 30 FPS in most cases. It is the ideal stream rate for popular websites like Twitch, with users even opting for just 24 FPS.

However, more is always better. Aiming for at least 60 FPS isn’t a bad idea if you have a powerful enough setup. Your viewers will love the higher fps and improved experience.

Do Graphics Card Affect FPS?

GPUs have the biggest impact on FPS since they are the core graphics processing unit.

A good GPU ensures that everything in a program loads correctly. If you do this right, you’ll get more FPS. When there isn’t a shortage of processing power or storage, both the CPU and GPU may focus on raising the FPS and smoothness of the program.

Do Processors Affect FPS?

CPUs or Processors also affect FPS in the same way that GPUs do. While the GPU is responsible for all graphical processing, the CPU is responsible for putting everything together. It’s like a builder putting everything in place so that everything works together.

With a powerful CPU, tasks like assigning storage for a program, allowing the GPU to perform at maximum efficiency, and so on go smoothly.

Having said that, while CPUs have an influence on FPS, the GPU has the most.

Will A Graphics Card Improve FPS?

Your total number of FPS will go up if you have a GPU. But that’s not all; the graphics card isn’t the only thing that affects FPS.

With a graphics card, the frames on the screen look faster and load faster. Besides this, you’ll also need a good CPU and RAM. All of these parts work together to boost a game’s FPS.

Let’s look at how you can improve FPS in your favorite games by upgrading parts like the graphics card, CPU, and RAM.

How GPU Helps With FPS

Many people believe that simply increasing the GPU would improve their FPS and this is the most important component. But is this really the case?

In most cases, yes. If your computer’s CPU is already great, you can only upgrade the GPU. In this case, the CPU is strong enough to handle other simple tasks, so the GPU can just focus on making your favorite games run faster.

But if the CPU is old and not very powerful, you may have trouble. Here, just upgrading the GPU won’t be enough. You’ll also need a compatible and powerful CPU.

How Processors Affect FPS

As said before, the power of your CPU has a significant impact on FPS. A powerful CPU makes sure that games run at their best. It reduces the number of loads imposed on the GPU and allows it to render the game flawlessly.

Furthermore, certain games benefit from having multiple cores. In this scenario, the core numbers and speed of the CPU are important aspects that will affect FPS throughout the game.

All things considered, your CPU and GPU need to work well together to avoid bottlenecks. Even though it’s not the most important part of increasing FPS, the CPU is still very important.

How To Increase FPS With A Graphics Card

When you play games, stream videos, or run a program, and it stutters, freezes, or even crashes, it can be very frustrating. It’s especially frustrating if you can’t upgrade the hardware you already have.

But you don’t need to worry because we’ve put together some good tips to help you boost your FPS and play smoothly. When all of these optimizations and tweaks are combined, they may make a significant impact.

But first, you’ve to figure out a few things—

1. Find Your Monitor’s Refresh Rate

The first thing you’ve to figure out to increase FPS is to find your computer’s refresh rate. It will give you an idea of how much FPS your monitor can reach. With this info, you can move on to the next steps easily.

To find your monitor’s refresh rate, follow these steps—

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Head on to System > Display.
  3. Scroll down and find Advanced Display settings. Here you’ll see the refresh rate of your current monitor.

After knowing your refresh rate, you can easily move on to the next step.

2. Find Out Your Current FPS

The next step is to find your current FPS count. It will depend mostly on the software you’re using.

For example, if you’re running a Steam game, you can turn on the FPS counter this way—

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Go to In-Game.
  3. Find and turn on In-Game FPS. Now you’ll see a constant FPS counter on the corner of your screen.

In this way, you can easily find FPS for a game.

As for other software, it’ll have a built-in setting to display FPS. It will usually be in Settings > Video or Settings > Advanced settings. In this way, you can find FPS for different programs.

Pro Tips To Increase FPS in Different Ways

Now that you know the refresh rate and FPS of your monitor, you can start to increase them. We’ve put together some of the best ways to increase your FPS right now.

1. Update Your Drivers and Platforms

The easiest tip is to update your drivers. You’ll be surprised how big of a difference that alone can make.

Backdated and incompatible drivers are a big reason games don’t run at optimum conditions. Simply updating your drivers fixes this issue, allowing you to enjoy those super fast and smooth frame rates.

To update your drivers on all types of computers and operating systems, we’ll recommend DriverFix. It’s a universal software that’ll help you download and upgrade all essential drivers. If done correctly, you may notice an increase in FPS across your programs.

2. Game Setting Optimization

The next thing we’d recommend you do is to tweak your in-game settings. Just switching the game’s settings to Low can quickly optimize your game for higher FPS. But keep in mind that alone isn’t good enough to get the best possible performance.

Simply lowering game settings or resolution will improve the average frame rate. You can change your resolution from 1080p to 720p or even 480p to quickly increase performance and FPS. Don’t be afraid of climbing into the Advanced Settings of your game and turning most things to Low.

But tweaking specific features can get you almost the same results, for a smaller reduction in performance and higher quality. Since different GPUs have different performances based on the options, it’s common to have 5-10% more FPS from just minor advanced tweaks.

Let’s take a look at some advanced settings you can tweak that are known to improve FPS.

Disable Anti-Aliasing and V-sync

Disabling Anti-aliasing and Vsync are two well-known ways to improve the FPS count drastically in any game. They’re usually found under advanced settings. But first, let’s understand what they are.

V-Sync

Vertical Synchronization, or V-sync, helps create a stable FPS depending on your monitor’s refresh rate.

If your monitor is 144hz, Vsync will make your game run at 144 FPS all the time. It locks your FPS for consistent gameplay. It’s power efficient too. It decreases the CPU and GPU usage while providing maximum FPS on games.

That being said, if you’ve already a good GPU and want to get the most out of it, we’d recommend keeping Vsync off. It is because good GPUs already have the power to reach sky-high FPS counts. Limiting them to the refresh rate of your monitor will only limit their true power.

Depending on your budget and GPU power, you can tweak the Vsync advanced setting to better improve your FPS throughout any game in this way.

Anti-Aliasing

It’s a feature that decreases rigidness for high-res images and blends the edges to create a smooth picture. But as you can probably guess, this takes a lot of computing power— which decreases your FPS count.

Keeping this advanced setting off can solve the problem easily, though. This way, the GPU won’t have to compute a smooth image and can focus more on increasing your FPS count.

3. Tweaking GPU Settings

Just like tweaking in-game settings like V-sync, you should become familiar with the settings of your GPU since it can highly affect your performance and FPS as well.

It could be tricky depending on your processor, though, as the settings might be different. Either way, here’s a useful but effective tweak for Nvidia—

  • Change Nvidia’s settings to Maximize performance. You can find it by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Nvidia Control Panel from the pop-up menu.
  • When it opens, select “Manage 3D Settings” listed on the left, just under the option called 3D Settings.
  • Now click the Global Settings tab shown on the right.
  • Scroll through the list till you find Power Management Mode. Make sure that it’s switched from Adaptive to Prefer Maximum Performance.
  • Click Apply to make the changes.

This simple and small tweak should give you a higher FPS while not affecting your computer at all.

4. Overclock GPU and CPU

You can overclock both your GPU and your CPU to give you higher FPS in games. But keep this as a last resort, as we’d highly recommend not to do this if possible. It can get a bit dangerous if done incorrectly.

But with that being said, overclocking is an easy and direct way to get a free performance boost.

Not all CPUs and GPUs work to their fullest capacity. They work at lower power than what they’re capable of to avoid overworking, overheating, and sudden crashes in the devices.

This is where overclocking comes in. When you overclock a CPU or GPU, you’re turning it up to its maximum power.

If you know what you’re doing, overclocking your GPU and CPU is highly beneficial, as it can increase performance from 5 up to 15%. You can also overclock your graphics card, with an average 5-10% increase in performance.

Still, it’s only recommended to do this as the last hope to get a higher FPS since it might be dangerous and could damage your components in the long run.

5. Disable SuperFetch (Sysmain) and Prefetch

SuperFetch, also referred to as Sysmain and Prefetch computers, boosts startup times, applications, and windows itself. It’s a prebuilt feature in Windows 10.

But from our research, we saw that if you have this feature turned on, it increases your background activity and slows your computer down instead of making it faster. And when it’s enabled, you’d get lower FPS.

This is why we’ve provided you with a way to fix it and turn it off—

  1. Go to Services by typing it in the search bar and open it.
  2. Scroll until you see Sysmain and click it twice to open.
  3. Click Disabled from the options menu.
  4. After that, click Apply and OK. You can now close the pop-up options menu and the Services window.
  5. Now, hold down your Windows key and press the R key on your then type regedit and click OK. It should give you an option. Click Yes on it.
  6. Paste this in the address bar and click Enter. Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
  7. Click “EnablePrefetcher” twice and enter the number 0 on the box. After that, click “OK“.

By doing this, you disabled both SuperFetch and Prefetch giving you better FPS in your favorite games.

6. Perform a BIOS Update

By updating your BIOS, you can easily improve the performance of your computer. Here’s how to update it—

  1. Download the latest BIOS from your computer manufacturer’s website.
  2. Unzip the file you downloaded and copy it to a USB flash drive.
  3. Restart your computer and enter BIOS.
  4. Use the menu and update BIOS.

It’s super simple to update your BIOS and is a viable way to get better FPS. If you can’t find your computer manufacturer’s website, you should google your computer’s company.

For example, this is the website for Dell. Hopefully, a Google search should bring up the website if you scroll for a bit.

7. Access Windows Game Mode

The simplest way to boost your FPS in a video game is by enabling Windows Game Mode. A built-in Windows 10 feature automatically optimizes your computer to handle games better.

It can do this by turning off unnecessary background apps, notifications, etc., to help your computer run faster and boost FPS.

Most of the time, it’s enabled by default. But if it’s not, here’s how to turn it on—

  • Open Settings by going to the Start menu. You can do this by clicking the cog icon or holding your Windows key and pressing I on your keyboard.
  • Navigate to the Gaming category. It can be found on the right side of your screen in the middle row in settings.
  • Select the option Game Mode and turn it on.

By doing this, Windows Game Mode is now turned on and will give a better average FPS.

8. Reduce Your Resolution

Another viable method to increase your FPS in video games is simply lowering your resolution or turning down your game settings. Most computers can’t run modern-day games at ultra-high or high quality at a stable 60 FPS.

As the resolution increases, your computer renders more pixels on your screen. It can be quite a hard task for your GPU since higher resolutions have a lot of pixels.

Here’s how you can turn your resolution down to get you better FPS—

  1. Go to your game, and go to Options.
  2. After Options, the menu varies from game to game, but most games have a resolution in the Video section.
  3. Navigate to your game’s Video section and select resolution.
  4. From there, turn it to whatever gives you better FPS. For example, 1920x1080p, more commonly known as 1080p, should give you high FPS since it doesn’t have many pixels.

You can easily get a higher FPS on any video game by doing this. But make sure not to turn it down too much; since then, you won’t be able to enjoy the game itself.

9. Upgrade Your RAM

By upgrading your computer’s RAM, you’re basically making everything faster as RAM decides how much you can do at once. If you have higher RAM, you can do more tasks at once.

It means that higher RAM will help you get better FPS and optimize your computer to make it faster since it’ll have more memory to do tasks.

You can easily buy RAM from a computer store or order it online. But make sure you get enough RAM for your needs.

16 or 32 GB of RAM is plenty for gaming for most people. But if you’re playing at a higher resolution, 64 GB of RAM is recommended.

10. Get a High-End SSD

SSD is a type of mechanical hard disk but faster. They’re much faster than normal hard disks, and having an SSD will make everything in your computer run faster and run smoother.

Upgrading to an SSD won’t directly give you a higher FPS, but it will speed up your computer a lot. It means if you have an SSD and enough RAM, you’ll be able to get a much higher FPS since your computer can do tasks with ease.

Choosing an SSD with at least 250GB of storage is good enough for most people, but it’s only the minimum starting point. Many games may need over 50GB, and you need 30 GB alone for windows.

It doesn’t include your other files either. And you’d need a few GB of storage for each file. So, getting over 500 GB of storage on your SSD is recommended, especially if you’re gaming, video editing, or streaming.

11. Use DLSS

DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling and is an Nvidia AI made for boosting FPS. It uses tensor cores and RTX to boost the FPS, but it doesn’t affect your resolution or quality.

DLSS is only for Nvidia graphics cards, though. But here’s how to turn it on—

  • First, you’ve to have an RTX 2060 or higher.
  • The monitor you use should be a 1440p or 4K compatible monitor.
  • With that done, go to your Video Game Settings.
  • Locate DLSS and turn it on.
  • Click on Apply.

DLSS doesn’t always work with all games, but it runs with most of today’s games. You don’t need to tweak any Nvidia setting to turn DLSS on. It’s a game setting.

12. Execute a Game Booster

With so much smart software and so many high-end games, Game boosters or any performance-boosting app will automatically make your laptop run at its finest.

A good example of this is the Razer Cortex: Game Booster. It is free software made for windows that can help you remove unnecessary applications, snooze background programs that aren’t necessary, uninstall useless software, and free up RAM.

It helps your entire computer function faster and smoother and provides you with better FPS.

13. Improve Airflow

Improving your airflow or keeping your computer cool is essential for high FPS. If your computer is hot, its performance decreases a lot.

Normally laptops or computers will have a way to cool themselves down when it’s hot, but here’s how to keep improving your laptop’s airflow for consistently high performance—

Clean Fans and Vents in Your Laptop

Cleaning the fans and vents of a computer is super important as if it can’t vent hot air faster, your computer will become slow. Physically cleaning your laptop regularly and tidying up the vents will make it, so it’s easier to keep itself cool.

Use It on a Flat Surface

Using a device on your lap isn’t recommended, and the word “laptop” is misleading. If you don’t place your laptop in a smooth and flat area, the air won’t circulate underneath. And if it’s on your lap, you’ll dampen the airflow.

Charge It

Things can get hot when your laptop is running on battery power, and you’re not charging it. Especially when you’re playing games since your laptop will get hotter while playing games.

On the other hand, it’ll cool down faster if you use your laptop while charging. And it’ll automatically increase performance and boost FPS if it cools down faster.

Put It on a Cooling Platform

If you put your laptop on an external cooling fan, it will blow air below your laptop, improving airflow. It is a super easy yet useful way to keep your laptop cool, especially when gaming.

You can buy a cooling fan for a low price and plug it into your laptop with a USB.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Can I add a graphics card to my laptop to increase FPS?

Yes. You can improve the graphics performance of your laptop by adding an eGPU or external GPU. They are basic USB plug-and-play devices that function similarly to a real GPU. This is an easy way to increase FPS in laptops.

Do gaming laptops overheat at high resolution and FPS?

In certain circumstances, yes. The processor and graphics card cause the laptop to heat up when fully loaded.

But it’s normal for gaming laptops to get hot. And there’s no need to be concerned since they have cooling systems.

Does RAM affect FPS?

Yes. Just like the CPU and GPU, the RAM also affects FPS. Adding additional RAM would enhance your FPS while also providing more memory.

Does playing games while charging your laptop increase FPS?

Yes. When you charge your laptop while playing, your FPS and performance will improve since it will be able to stay cool and function at its best.

Even if you keep charging when it’s full, it won’t hurt the battery life of your laptop because most modern laptops stop charging when they’re full.

Will your GPU be damaged if you overclock it?

Yes. Overclocking your GPU isn’t a good idea in the long term because it reduces the lifespan of your hardware. But overclocking your GPU doesn’t always hurt it.

You can overclock without hurting your GPU or any other parts if you are careful. However, if it is not absolutely necessary, you better avoid it.

Final Thoughts

That is all you need to know about the impact of a graphics card on your fps.

To conclude, if you want high frame rates with decent resolutions, you need to invest in a powerful CPU as well as a GPU. However, if you’re on a limited budget, we’d recommend trying out the tweaks we mentioned before investing in a GPU. We hope things go well for you.

Recommended graphics card list:

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Chris Martin is a professional tech writer. He's been covering tech tutorials, hardware reviews, and more as a professional writer for over seven years now and it doesn't look like he'll be stopping anytime soon! In addition to writing about the latest gadgets on the market, he also covers topics such as how to set up your home network or troubleshoot any computer problems you may have.

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