Before we begin I would like to just get this out the way:
This guide is not for enthusiastic overclockers looking to beat FPS (Frames Per Second) benchmarks by achieving massive FPS via benchmarking software, this is a guide for your average gamer to help understand why FPS is important and how you can squeeze a little extra out of your computer without being too drastic.
Common Misconceptions
You will see it come up time and time again all over the internet, “Your eye can only see (insert random number here) so why do you need more?”. I have even commented this myself in the distant past before fully appreciating fully what FPS does.
The human eye does not work on a FPS mechanic, it is much.. much more complicated than that, however if you were to try explain the FPS mechanic using the eye as a base you could think of a wagon wheel spinning quickly, your eye sees it spinning until it reaches a certain rotation and then your eye will see it sort of going the other direction in a blur, this is because your brain is trying to understand the blur and projects it differently – this is obviously a seriously simplified explanation but should do to explain the concept. So your now that we have established that the eye can only process certain “FPS” why is it important to give it more? Your eye is only a conduit for your brain, which is infinitely complex and is able to piece broken FPS back together (think of the wagon wheel again), so although you can only see a certain FPS you are able to process a higher amount and this allows smoother “gameplay” in your head.
Aside from the ramblings above.. a constant FPS in most high end games of say 30 would reduce to around 10 FPS in high action sequences or graphically intense situations. This is why it is important to have a constant FPS as high as you can achieve without sacrificing too much visual splendour, if your FPS was 60 constant and you went down to 20 in high action sections of the game that would still be very responsive and respectable.
FPS is also directly related to input sampling, so the higher your FPS the more responsive your mouse and keyboard will be, even past the 100 FPS mark this is very noticeable, that extra control of your mouse makes gameplay smoother and reduces hardware to software latency.
Settings That Greatly Affect Framerate
Things you should consider changing to increase framrate on your PC.
Anti-aliasing
– This is the setting which reduces the jagged lines graphics produce on the screen.
Those jagged lines are a physical limitation of your monitor, your PC screen be it LCD, TFT or CRT is arranged in a grid of pixels, when drawing lines straight up or down there is no jagged effect however when you go diagonally across the pixels it will cause a “step” effect. Anti aliasing works by changing the colouring around these jagged edges to trick the eye into thinking they are smooth, by reducing or increasing the colouring or shading of the edge the software can make things look really smooth. However to achieve this your graphics card must process significantly more information which will limit resources needed for other operations, resulting in a stark framerate drop depending on what level of AA you have turned on.
Turning this setting down or even off will massively improve your framerate.
Vertical Sync
– This is the bit of software which stops screen tearing caused by monitor buffering
Vertical Sync was a big thing back when people mainly had CRT monitors, with the introduction of modern monitors this setting is almost obsolete despite being present in most gaming option lists. Screen tearing is caused because your monitor refreshes from the top down and stores the next image/frame in a buffer, it then starts the refreshing procedure again this time putting the fresh image on top of the previous one, again starting from the top down. The delay between these updates is where tearing comes from.
It is advisable to switch vertical sync off and seeing how your PC behaves, if you find you are still having screen tearing you should try turning triple buffering on, this will increase buffer layers and should stop any tearing problems.
Resolution
– Screen resolution plays a major part in FPS by increasing/reducing load on your GPU.
Everyone wants a massive resolution these days, in the not too distant past players used to use extremely low resolutions in games like Counter-Strike so that acquiring targets was much easier due to larger pixel display on the screen. Modern shooters like the battlefield series and MMO’s benefit greatly from higher resolutions now, the trade-off however is loss in performance as your GPU is forced to simply render more on the screen. Try to find a balance in games between resolution and performance, sometimes it is better to have higher settings on a lower resolution and get a bit more graphics eye candy from your game.
Antistropic Filtering
– This is a type of filtering which further reduces blurring and aliasing at extreme angles (such as a horizon).
Antistropic Filtering was introduced as a more complex form of MipMapping which is the art of reducing jagged lines (aliasing) on distant and odd angled graphics in games. I cannot go too much into detail on the subject because I would literally just be quoting from somewhere else as I have very little knowledge on this myself. I can however tell you that AF is very graphic intensive because it is very bandwidth hungry and can turn an otherwise playable game into a nightmare.
You should attempt bilinear or trilinear filtering before switching on antistropic filtering.
General PC Settings
– Things to attempt at Windows level which will increase performance.
Turn everything off - If you have plans to play a graphically intensive game and you will be on it for a little while (which is what usually happens) make a concious effort to end all of your other tasks, close unneeded programs and if you have been on your PC for a while give it a quick log out and back in, this will help speed things up a lot and only takes a few seconds to implement.
Update your drivers – Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date, check out the FingerSports tutorial here for more information on how to properly update graphics drivers
Check your PC for SpyWare and MalWare – Please don’t be afraid to spend a little money on some decent anti-virus software. A copy of Kaspersky Internet Security will set you back £20 on Amazon or Ebay on a good day and is extremely discreet and easy to manage.
Free up disk space – Get rid of things you don’t need, I frequently check add/remove programs to see what is lurking after a 2am rash install, its a good idea to remove things you have not used for a while as it will typically take no time at all to reinstall them if you feel you need them again.
Defrag regularly – After major clean-ups or installations you should always defrag, on a newer PC this will be quick and effortless and will increase performance quite a decent amount. (DO NOT defrag SSD’s!)
Disable Aero on Win7 and Vista – It may look pleasing but Aero is a memory hog! Check out this guide for disabling this cosmetic windows feature.
Disable the sidebar – Disable the Vista or Win7 sidebar to claw back important resources, how often do you use it anyway?
Run a memory checker – Memory errors or faults can cause major havoc in your system, its a good idea to run a checker from time to time to check the health of your memory. If you find a fault the good news is that memory is one of the least expensive and easiest to replace components in your PC. A popular checker is memtest – make sure you do your homework on this subject before diving in head first.
Appreciate your comment Snes, these articles are also completely overlooked by our own community most of the time haha, but I enjoy writing them and I know a few people from random search engines get something out of them.
These kinds of articles are often missing – there are so many interesting aspects about gaming that are often missen by games journalism. This article is something that every gamer should know, but we hardly ever do because this kind of information is never provided. Nice work