Introduction

A gaming laptop is the ideal companion for fulfilling all of your gaming needs. It can provide you with endless amounts of pure gaming fun. Since gaming is an intensive activity for any device, you can find that the laptop’s gaming performance starts reducing over time. While there are several reasons for such reduced performance, there are some steps, which you can undertake to ensure a smooth experience.

We have encountered the query, ‘How to boost my laptop gaming performance?’ multiple times in the past. Hence, we have decided to answer your queries in this article to ensure that all gamers like you can optimise their systems to get maximum performance and enhance their gaming experience. In this blog, we will be looking at some of the most commonly used techniques to boost your laptop’s gaming performance.

5 Hardware-based Steps for Improving Laptop Gaming Performance

Following are 5 major hardware-based steps for improving the overall gaming performance of your laptop:

  1. Clean Laptop frequently

Long-term accumulation of dust can cause the heating vents to clog, heating your system and shortening its life span. Hence. Keeping your laptop clean improves the gaming performance as well as improves the overall life of your gaming laptop. You can use an isopropyl alcohol solution to clean your screen, and Q-tips to clean your vents.

  1. Plug into Mains

Another simple step is to play games only when the laptop is connected to the main AC power supply. Connecting to the mains will provide the laptop with the required power to maximise the fan speed and run the GPU in ‘high-performance’ mode, providing you with a smooth gaming experience.

  1. Place Laptop on Hard Surface

When you place your laptop on soft surfaces such as a bed or sofa, you are effectively clogging the exhaust vents, making the laptop hot. It leads to higher heat inside the laptop, leading to frame drops as the software tries to lower the GPU and CPU performance to lower the heat. Hence, simply place your gaming laptop on a hard surface to improve its gaming performance.

  1. Add Solid State Drive

Adding a Solid State Drive (SSD) can improve your gaming laptop’s performance by almost 5 times since these drives perform much better than traditional hard disks. SSDs can provide faster read-write speeds, making your laptop feel much quicker, which translates into quicker load speed and smoother overall gaming performance.

  1. Add More RAM

Nowadays entry-level gaming laptops come with at least 8 GB of RAM. On the other hand, the latest games require at least 16 GB of RAM to run smoothly, especially if you are using older gaming laptops. Hence, you should try upgrading your RAM if you feel you need more gaming performance from your gaming laptop.

5 Software-based Steps for Improving Laptop Gaming Performance

Now that we have understood the required hardware-related changes, let us check out the software side:

  1. Keep Drivers Updated

All major hardware manufacturers provide updated drivers to their hardware frequently. These updates improve the overall lifespan of the device as they can provide support for new games using the existing hardware. If you are short on time, you should at least update the graphic card drivers for extended gaming performance.

  1. Enable ‘Game Mode’

Windows 10 and 11 have a dedicated ‘Game Mode’, which provides you with enhanced performance improvements. To enable it, follow the steps below:

  1. Open the ‘Settings’ app and click on the ‘Gaming’ tile.
  2. Click on the ‘Game Mode’ menu on the left side of the screen.
  3. Toggle the ‘Game Mode’ switch to the ‘On’ position.
  1. Enable ‘Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling’

Similar to the ‘Game Mode’, both Windows 10 and 11 come with the option of enabling ‘Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling’. This setting reduces latency and improves the overall gaming performance of your laptop. To enable it, kindly follow the steps below:

  1. Open the ‘Settings’ app and click on the ‘System’ tile.
  2. Click on the ‘Display’ menu on the left side of the screen and scroll down to select the ‘Graphic settings’ option.
  3. Toggle the ‘Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling’ switch to the ‘On’ position, and restart your laptop.
  1. Use ‘High Performance’ Battery Mode

If you check the battery settings in your laptop, you can observe that it will be set to ‘Balanced’ by default. You need to change that setting manually to ‘High Performance’ mode. Setting it to this mode ensures better performance at the cost of higher battery usage. However, you will be getting complete fan speed and enhanced GPU and CPU performance in this mode.

  1. Close Background Apps

If you limit the number of apps that are running in the background, you will free up precious RAM to help you run your games faster. To minimise the background apps, you need to follow the steps below:

  1. Open the ‘Settings’ app and click on the ‘Privacy’ tile.
  2. Click on the ‘Background apps’ menu on the left side of the screen and toggle the ‘Background Apps’ switch to the ‘Off’ position.
  3. Alternatively, you can keep that setting on and toggle the switch against individual apps if you wish to keep some important apps running in the background.

Conclusion

The steps we have provided in this article ensure you can game smoothly over long periods without getting frustrated over lags and freezes. Since gaming laptops are meant for gaming, these systems have a higher heat tolerance and hence, you can push it beyond normal laptops.

We request you change the settings and undertake the tweaks provided in this article to have a better overall gaming experience with your beloved machine. It will enhance your current gaming experience while also improving your laptop’s performance over time.