10 PC Settings You Should Always Change First
She has interviewed numerous game directors, including those of games like Overwatch and Dead by Daylight. Allyson has written and edited thousands of guides, and she genuinely loves every minute of it.
PC gaming is wonderful because it lets you tweak just about everything. PC gaming is also terrible because it lets you tweak just about everything. Booting up a new game often means being greeted by a wall of sliders and mysterious acronyms that seem meant to intimidate anyone who just wants to start playing.
The good news is that you don't need to spend hours watching optimization videos or copying a professional esports player's settings. A handful of simple adjustments can improve performance, reduce input lag, make games look sharper, and even save your hardware from unnecessary stress. These are the settings you should check before getting into almost any PC game.
Turn Off Motion Blur
Motion blur is one of the first settings many PC players disable, and for good reason. While it's intended to make movement appear more cinematic, it often makes fast-paced gameplay look softer and less detailed. During firefights or quick camera turns, excessive blur can make it harder to track enemies or spot important game details.
Some developers implement subtle motion blur well, but many games crank it up by default. That's especially noticeable if you're playing on a high refresh rate monitor, where the naturally smoother image makes artificial blur feel unnecessary.
If a game offers separate settings for camera motion blur and object motion blur, you can experiment with keeping the latter enabled while disabling camera blur. Still, for most, completely disabling the effect results in a more responsive-looking experience that lets the artwork shine instead of smearing across your screen.
Enable DLSS, FSR, Or XeSS
Upscaling technologies are some of the biggest performance boosts available in PC gaming. NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS all work by rendering the game internally at a lower resolution before reconstructing the final image.
The result is often a significant increase in frame rate with surprisingly little compromise. In many newer games, the 'Quality' preset can look nearly identical to native resolution while still having better performance.
If you're having issues getting smooth frame rates, enabling one of these technologies should be one of your first troubleshooting steps. Even gamers with powerful graphics cards can use them to reach higher refresh rates or enable more demanding visual features like ray tracing.
Just avoid the more aggressive Performance or Ultra Performance presets unless you really need the extra frames, as image quality starts to suffer more noticeably at those lower rendering resolutions.
Adjust Your Field Of View
Field of View, often shortened to FOV, controls how much of the game fits on your screen at once. A wider FOV lets you see more of your surroundings, which can be an advantage in first-person shooters, especially. Many games still default to values around 70 or 80 degrees, which can feel a tad narrow on a PC monitor. Increasing the setting to somewhere between 90 and 110 often makes for a more natural perspective while reducing that tunnel vision effect.
It's also worth experimenting if you experience motion sickness. There's no universal best number. Your monitor size and personal preference all play a role, so spend a few minutes finding the sweet spot.
Cap Your Frame Rate
It might seem strange to intentionally limit performance, but an unlimited frame rate isn't always ideal. Allowing your GPU to render as many frames as possible can cause unnecessary heat and inconsistent frame pacing.
Setting a frame rate cap close to your monitor's refresh rate makes for a better overall experience. For example, if you have a 144Hz monitor, you might cap your game at 141 or 142 FPS.
Frame caps are also useful in older games where new hardware can produce hundreds of frames per second without any real benefit. Instead of wasting those resources, your system runs cooler and quieter while still having gameplay that feels just as smooth.
Turn Off Launcher Overlays
PC gaming has become a game of managing a dozen different windows before you even reach the main menu. From Steam, Discord, NVIDIA, Xbox Game Bar, and publisher launchers, there are lots of background overlays competing for attention, and sometimes performance.
While overlays can be useful for screenshots or quickly replying to messages, they can also add performance issues. You don't need to disable everything, but it's worth testing if you're troubleshooting performance problems. Turning off unnecessary overlays can free up a little system memory and reduce the number of programs fighting for GPU resources.
Lower Shadow Quality Before Anything Else
Not every graphics setting affects performance equally. Shadows are often among the most demanding options in games, yet they're also one of the hardest differences to notice during gameplay. Dropping shadow quality from Ultra to High, or even Medium, can recover a decent amount of performance while producing only subtle changes. Most won't even notice the difference unless you're stopping specifically to compare screenshots.
Rather than lowering texture quality or resolution first, reducing shadows usually delivers a much better balance between image quality and performance. It's one of the easiest ways to squeeze extra frames out of almost any gaming PC without making the game noticeably uglier. Score!
Disable Mouse Acceleration
Competitive peeps have been recommending this for years, but I really recommend it as it benefits almost everyone using a mouse. Mouse acceleration changes how far your cursor moves based on how quickly you move your hand. Slow movements travel shorter distances, while faster movements cover more ground. While that might sound helpful, it creates inconsistent muscle memory that's especially frustrating in shooters.
Disabling Enhance Pointer Precision in Windows removes this acceleration, which in turn gives you one-to-one mouse movement that feels more predictable. Most new games also offer Raw Mouse Input, which bypasses Windows processing altogether. It may take a day or two to adjust if you've always used acceleration, but I still recommend it.
Turn On HDR If Your Display Supports It
HDR has become pretty common, but plenty either forget to enable it or just never calibrate it properly. When implemented well, High Dynamic Range dramatically improves contrast and color depth. For example, game explosions will be more colorful, and sunsets will get a next level of realism that standard SDR can't really match.
Not every game features HDR support, but when it does, the difference can be immediately noticeable. If you've invested in an HDR-capable monitor, it's worth taking a few minutes to make sure you're getting the experience you paid your cold, hard cash for.
Update Your Graphics Drivers
It isn't the most exciting recommendation, sure, but outdated graphics drivers are responsible for countless avoidable performance issues.
GPU manufacturers regularly release driver updates that improve optimization for newly launched games, fix crashes, eliminate visual bugs, and sometimes give you surprisingly large performance gains. Installing the latest driver before playing a brand-new release can prevent problems before they even appear.
That doesn't necessarily mean updating the second a new driver launches. Occasionally, early releases introduce new bugs of their own, so waiting a few days for community feedback isn't a bad idea if everything is already running smoothly.
Still, if you've gone months without updating, it's one of the easiest maintenance tasks you can perform. It only takes a few minutes and can immediately improve compatibility across your entire game library.
Check That Your Monitor Is Running At Its Maximum Refresh Rate
This one catches more PC gamers than almost any other setting. Buying a 144Hz, 165Hz, or even 240Hz gaming monitor doesn't automatically mean Windows is using that refresh rate. New monitors and graphics driver updates can all leave the display locked at 60Hz by default.
You can verify your refresh rate through Windows Display Settings or your graphics driver's control panel in less than a minute. Right-click your desktop, open Display settings, then go to Advanced display. Under Choose a refresh rate, select the highest option available for your monitor.
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