Windows Settings to Change for Gaming

If you're a gamer, changing some of these both well-known and little-known Windows settings might be a good idea.

Leave a reply with your requests for future episodes.

FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE
---------------------------------------------------

[sedistikbutnotreally]

Drawing flame decals on the sides of my pc makes it faster

[daniel]

The Nagle's algorithm tweak is useless as games use UDP packets to transfer data and this algorithm only is an optimization of TCP packets. In fact, by doing this "tweak" you will decrease the efficiency of anything requiring TCP connections, like browsing, downloading files and so on...

[itsdonallen]

ALT+F4 speeds up just about every game for me. I try to hit it during really important moments for maximum effect.

[Christopher_Widjaja]

If you want to use the "adjust for best performance", I recommend to keep the "smooth edge of screen fonts" box ticked, because it can sometimes alter how text are displayed in the screen

[croozerdog]

once you're used to having no mouse acceleration you become a pro fps player on the desktop after a few months. you learn the exact distance to other stuff on the screen, feels awesome

[arithex]

List of things I was maybe hoping to learn more about, but didn't:
- HAGS (hardware-assisted graphics scheduling) .. what the heck is that about?
- Resize-BAR .. I also still don't really understand what the tradeoff is, with that
- the "Fullscreen Optimizations" stuff seems to have come/gone/changed a lot over the past 5 years .. I have no idea what the current state of that is, and what's best
- any settings or visibility into controlling keyboard/mouse/joystick input latency, on Windows

And, maybe more on the NVidia side of things, than Windows, but:
- how do things like HDR, color-depth, and GPU-scaling affect fps and latency?
- what the heck is "low-latency mode" .. does it have any different effect when running games in borderless-window mode vs fullscreen-exclusive mode

[lakitu]

But games use UDP and not TCP which has Nagle's algorithm disabled already. Also you would only be disabling it for the packets you send. Not the ones you receive from your opponents so you still wouldn't see a difference.

[AB-gmyi]

One setting in games to look for is to play in fullscreen exclusive instead of windowed fullscreen. Fullscreen exclusive is usually less demanding, while windowed fullscreen could be better if you need to alt-tab alot and have any overlays in the game.

[IgnavumFortuna]

I'd really like a similar videos, but for stuff you should change in the BIOS/UEFI Settings for a new PC. Stuff like:
Enable XMP/EXPO,
Enable ReBar,
Maybe adjusting power limits for intel CPUs,
Maybe some more nieche settings. idk.

It'd be also great to have an example for where to find each setting in the most common Motherboard vendor UIs (MSI, Gigabyte ...)

Every time I setup a new PC I struggle to remember everything.

[WeAreNotExperts]

The amount of people I know that don’t go into windows settings and change the refresh rate to suit their monitor

[lemagicalpotato]

I had a problem at work that I solved yesterday by turning off game mode. I’m a software developer, and my laptop has just enough RAM to run Docker containers, WSL, VScode, and a browser or several browsers. On a new laptop, I would periodically experience random slowdowns with some windows freezing, becoming unresponsive, or slowing down significantly. It seems so far that game mode being on by default was the issue. With users in general being more prone to opening a larger amount of apps at the same time, I’m surprised that it comes on by default instead of showing up like a recommendation maybe in the system notifications when you start playing a game

[beansnrice]

So, I've got this old 14 core xeon workstation with 128gb of ram and I use it for playing games and keeping track of like 20-30 chrome tabs ata a time and always used to see call kinds of weird hitching with the internet. I just tried the registry trick you mentioned and my latency has been smooth as butter ever since. Since I have more ram and cores than I'd ever know what to do with, I probably would see little to no benefit to using Nagle's algorithm and would only experience any costs. Thanks for the tip!

[Johnnyb]

Game mode doesn't work I've still had notifications popup and wouldn't go away until I press the x to dismiss this has happened to me an uncountable amount of times now.

[DiamondMaster]

Bro thank you so much, I keep missing my hits in MC, and now I know why 😂😂

[mendyc]

1:00 but what if I randomly need one of the 200+ tabs I have opened while gaming…?

[EndlessExertion]

Can’t believe they didn’t mention to turn off game DVR as thats the biggest fps increase from windows settings

[DARKSHADOW-Ark]

I recently reset my pc. I completely forgot about enhanced pointer precision. Thank you, gonna give the recommendation with the registry editor a try.

[HeisenbergFam]

The thumbnail with Linus telling you to delete system32 is most Linus thing I've seen

[Dav.]

Aye that last tip was massive. Plz more like that!

[ydid]

hey techquickie video idea here: make a compilation of forum resources for obscure computer things

i remember tons of forums from the late 90s to the early 2010s which had tons of information about anything such as RMA or per game per gpu nvidia "developer" level settings or even very niche information like the best ergonomic controller button mapping for the best layout

this library isn't limited to PCs alone but all kinds of hardware, its even bigger than all the obscure info in YouTube believe it or not, a library of babel !

people discuss and collect all kinds of information enriching the internet

this deserves a giant video, do it.