When it comes to gaming PCs, speed is everything. Slow speeds and lag can ruin any gaming experience and lead to a lot of frustration. A common question to ask is “how do you improve the speed of your PC?”
Any improvement to PC speed is going to be welcome news to any gamer, so in this article, we’ll be taking you through the easy ways to improve your gaming PC’s speed.
Upgrade To An SSD
One of the first steps that any gamer should take is to upgrade to an SSD. SSDs are much faster than those mechanical hard disks you’ve been relying on so far for your storage.
While it won’t do much in the way of improving frame rate or gaming performance, it will definitely help with load time for your games. That’s less time waiting around and more time gaming – a win-win in any gamer’s eyes.
Using an SSD has the benefit of instant performance when it comes to booting up your system and any games or applications you want to load up. This is because SSDs don’t have to mechanically look for data on a moving platter as a HDD does.
How do you choose an SSD? The best SSD for gaming should have at least 250 GB of storage ideally to get the most out of it.
If your motherboard supports it, you can also look at buying an NVMe SSD for faster read/write speeds and an even smaller hard drive.
Update All Your Drivers
A graphics card can only get you so far when it comes to gaming performance. There are lots of other elements in your PC which contribute to performance, in both good and bad ways. One of them is the software you have installed on your PC. More specifically, the drivers.
Your performance can sometimes be hindered by the drivers you have installed, this is why it’s so important to take some time to make sure these are all updated. Out of date drivers can often be the culprit in things slowing down.
Driver updates handle a number of things including fixing bugs and also boosting performance – often significantly.
Luckily, updating your drivers is easy enough to do. The best way to do it is to look at what type of graphics card you have and visit the manufacturer’s website which will have a downloads or driver page. They should have the latest drivers ready for you to download from there.
If you can’t remember what type of graphics card you have and don’t fancy opening up your whole PC to check, you can do it through your Control Panel. Open up “Control Panel”, then click on “Hardware and Sound” and then “Device Manager”. This should show your graphics card brand under “Display Adapters”.
However, you’ll find that your graphics card of choice will likely have its own software hub that allows you to tweak settings and optimise games. This often has the ability to automatically check for driver updates.
Optimizing In-Game and Control Panel Settings
As mentioned briefly above, if you’re still dealing with speed issues, it’s time to head into the settings and make some tweaks.
When it comes to playing games, it’s easy enough to make changes to the game’s graphics settings which will have a massive impact on the overall speed.
Another approach you could take is to make use of software from AMD, Nvidia or Intel (depending on which one you’re using for your graphics card or processor) which allows you to tweak settings.
From their software, you can tweak settings such as VSync, this synchronises the frames your graphics card renders with the refresh rate of the monitor. Other settings you can play around with include Threaded Optimization or Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames – both of which can affect the speed and performance of your PC and games.
Upgrade Your Graphics Card
While this is the more expensive option on the list, it’s still worth considering. If you have an outdated graphics card which is derailing your gameplay, it could be time for an upgrade.
Upgrading your GPU is often the best way to improve performance if all else fails. There’s only so much tweaking you can do on an old graphics card before you accept that it’s the specifications of the card itself which are dragging you down.
Searching for the best graphics cards can be quite overwhelming with so many options out there. You might want to narrow down to a budget first or even your favourite brand just so you can focus your search. When hunting for your next graphics card, pay particular attention to clock speed, VRAM and cooling systems to get the most out of your new purchase.
Try Out a Few Options to Improve PC Speed
If you have been dealing with PC speed issues, then it’s good to know that there are several options you can try to improve your gaming PC’s speed. Some of these will be quicker and easier to implement than others so it’s probably best to start with those first.
However, don’t disregard upgrading your GPU. It might be more expensive, but it also might be time to get rid of your ancient card if performance and speed are affecting your entire PC and gaming experience.
