How to Increase FPS on Laptop

Gaming

By PJ
April 30, 2026 - 2 min

If you've ever sat down for a gaming session only to be greeted by choppy, stuttering visuals, you already know how frustrating low FPS can be. Frames per second (FPS) is the single most important measure of gaming smoothness, and on a laptop — where hardware is compact, thermals are tight, and power is limited — squeezing out every extra frame requires a deliberate approach. The good news is that you don't need to buy a new machine. With the right tweaks, most laptops can deliver noticeably better performance.

Understand Why Laptops Struggle with FPS

Before fixing the problem, it helps to understand it. Laptops are designed with portability and battery life in mind, which means manufacturers make compromises that directly affect gaming performance.

Thermal throttling is the biggest culprit. When your CPU or GPU gets too hot, the system automatically reduces their clock speeds to prevent damage. This is called throttling, and it can cut your performance by 20–40% mid-session without you even realizing it. Unlike desktop towers with large heatsinks and case fans, laptops dissipate heat through thin vents and small fans, so heat builds up fast under gaming loads.

Power limits are another hidden bottleneck. Many laptops cap how much wattage the CPU and GPU can draw, especially on battery. Even when plugged in, budget and mid-range laptops often impose strict power limits that prevent the hardware from running at its full potential.

Finally, background software, outdated drivers, and mismatched settings all pile on top of the hardware limitations, dragging FPS down further. Fixing FPS on a laptop means attacking the problem on all these fronts simultaneously.

1. Always Play Plugged In and Set Power Plan to High Performance

This is the single easiest and most impactful change you can make. When a laptop runs on battery, Windows and the system firmware deliberately throttle CPU and GPU performance to conserve power. The drop can be dramatic — sometimes 30–50% less GPU performance compared to plugged-in mode.

Plug your charger in before launching any game. Then go to your Windows power settings and switch to High Performance or Ultimate Performance mode.

To do this:

Search for Power & sleep settings in the Start menu
Click Additional power settings
Select High performance (or Ultimate Performance if available)

Some gaming laptops also have a dedicated performance mode through their manufacturer's software — such as Armoury Crate on ASUS, Dragon Center on MSI, or Vantage on Lenovo. Always set this to Performance or Turbo mode when gaming.

2. Update Your GPU Drivers

Outdated GPU drivers are a surprisingly common FPS killer. Driver updates frequently include game-specific optimizations, bug fixes, and performance improvements that can add meaningful frames in newer titles.

For NVIDIA laptops, download the latest drivers from the official NVIDIA website or use GeForce Experience, which can detect your GPU and install the right driver automatically. For AMD laptops, use AMD Adrenalin Software. Intel integrated graphics drivers can be updated through the Intel Driver & Support Assistant.

After installing new drivers, restart your laptop before testing performance. It's also worth doing a clean install of the driver rather than just updating over the old one, as leftover files from old drivers can sometimes cause conflicts.

3. Manage In-Game Graphics Settings

Your graphics settings have the largest direct impact on FPS of anything on this list. The goal is to find the balance between visual quality and performance that works best for your hardware.

Resolution is the most powerful lever. Running at 1080p instead of 1440p can nearly double your FPS on the same hardware. If your laptop has a 1080p screen, make sure you're not accidentally rendering at a higher resolution.

Shadow quality is one of the most GPU-intensive settings in most games. Dropping shadows from Ultra to Medium often recovers 10–20 FPS with minimal visible impact during fast gameplay.

Anti-aliasing smooths jagged edges but is extremely demanding. Disable it entirely or switch to a lighter option like FXAA instead of MSAA 4x or 8x.

Ambient occlusion, volumetric lighting, and ray tracing are luxury settings that punish weaker hardware hard. Turn these off or set them to their lowest option.

Texture quality is usually safe to keep at Medium or High since it mostly affects VRAM usage rather than raw GPU processing. If your laptop has 4GB of VRAM or less, dropping textures to Medium can help prevent stuttering.

A practical approach is to lower every setting to its lowest value, check FPS, then raise settings one by one to find which ones cost the most performance. Prioritize the settings that give the most visual benefit per FPS cost.

4. Enable or Configure NVIDIA DLSS / AMD FSR

If your laptop has an NVIDIA RTX GPU, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is one of the best tools available. It uses AI to render the game at a lower internal resolution and then upscales it intelligently, often producing image quality close to native resolution at significantly higher FPS. In supported games, DLSS Quality mode can improve performance by 30–60% with minimal visual loss.

For AMD GPUs, FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) serves a similar purpose and works on a wider range of hardware, including older cards. FSR is also supported in a growing number of games even on NVIDIA hardware.

Intel Arc laptops can use XeSS, Intel's own upscaling solution, in supported titles.

Look for these options in the graphics settings of your game under labels like "Upscaling," "Super Resolution," or "DLSS Mode." Setting DLSS or FSR to Quality is a great starting point — it gives most of the performance benefit while preserving most of the visual fidelity.

5. Keep Your Laptop Cool

As mentioned earlier, thermal throttling is often the hidden reason your FPS drops over time during a session. Your laptop might perform well for the first 10 minutes, then gradually slow down as temperatures rise. Addressing thermals is essential for sustained performance.

Clean the vents and fans. Dust buildup is the most common cause of poor laptop cooling. Use compressed air to blow dust out of the vents every few months. If you're comfortable opening the laptop, cleaning the heatsink directly makes a significant difference.

Use a laptop cooling pad. A good cooling pad with active fans positioned under the laptop's intake vents can reduce CPU and GPU temperatures by 5–10°C, which is often enough to prevent throttling. This is one of the best value upgrades for gaming laptops.

Elevate the laptop. Even propping the rear of the laptop up slightly with a small stand or book improves airflow through the bottom vents. Never place a gaming laptop on a soft surface like a bed or couch — fabric blocks the vents entirely.

Monitor your temperatures. Tools like HWiNFO64 or MSI Afterburner let you monitor CPU and GPU temperatures in real time. If your CPU is hitting 95°C or above during gaming, throttling is definitely occurring and should be addressed.

6. Use MSI Afterburner to Overclock or Optimize the GPU

MSI Afterburner is a free utility that works on nearly all laptops regardless of GPU brand. It gives you control over GPU clock speeds, memory speeds, power limits, fan curves, and temperature monitoring.

On laptops, GPU overclocking is limited compared to desktops, but you can still push the GPU core clock up by 50–100 MHz and the memory clock by 200–500 MHz in many cases for a modest FPS gain. More importantly, Afterburner lets you set a more aggressive fan curve to keep temperatures lower, which directly prevents throttling.

Be conservative when overclocking — add small amounts, test stability by running a benchmark or game for 15–20 minutes, and stop if you see crashes or artifacts. The goal on a laptop isn't maximum overclock — it's finding the highest stable setting that prevents thermal throttling.

7. Close Background Applications and Processes

Every application running in the background competes with your game for CPU, RAM, and sometimes GPU resources. Common culprits include:

Web browsers — Chrome and Edge are notorious RAM consumers. Close all browser tabs before gaming.
Discord with hardware acceleration enabled — go to Discord settings and disable hardware acceleration under Appearance to free up GPU resources.
OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox — these sync services can spike disk and CPU usage unexpectedly.
Antivirus scans — schedule these for when you're not gaming. Real-time scanning can cause significant CPU spikes mid-game.
Windows Update — disable automatic downloads during gaming sessions via Windows Update settings.

You can check what's consuming resources by opening Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) and sorting by CPU and GPU usage before launching a game.

8. Adjust Windows Visual Effects and Game Mode

Windows itself consumes GPU and CPU resources to render animations, transparency effects, and visual flourishes that offer no benefit during gaming.

To disable these, search for "Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows" in the Start menu. Select "Adjust for best performance" to turn off all animations, or manually uncheck the ones you don't need.

Also make sure Windows Game Mode is enabled. This tells Windows to prioritize resources for your game over background processes. Find it under Settings → Gaming → Game Mode and toggle it on.

Additionally, in the same Gaming section of Windows Settings, go to Graphics and add your games manually. Set each one to High Performance to ensure Windows assigns your dedicated GPU to it rather than the integrated graphics.

9. Make Sure the Game Is Using the Dedicated GPU

Many laptops have both an integrated GPU (built into the CPU) and a dedicated GPU (NVIDIA or AMD). If a game accidentally runs on the integrated GPU, performance will be drastically worse — often by 5 to 10 times.

To force a game to use the dedicated GPU:

On NVIDIA laptops:

Open the NVIDIA Control Panel
Go to Manage 3D settings → Program Settings
Add your game executable and set the preferred graphics processor to High-performance NVIDIA processor

On Windows 11/10:

Go to Settings → System → Display → Graphics
Browse to add your game's .exe file
Set it to High performance

After making this change, verify it's working by opening Task Manager during gameplay and checking which GPU is showing activity on the Performance tab.

10. Optimize Game-Specific Launch Options and Settings

Many games have additional performance settings outside the main graphics menu or through launch options.

In Steam, right-click a game, go to Properties, and in the Launch Options field you can add commands. For example:

-novid skips the intro video and loads faster
-high sets the game process to high priority
Specific games like CS2 have their own optimization commands (such as -tickrate 128 for servers)

In games built on Unreal Engine, you can sometimes force certain rendering settings through configuration files in the game's AppData folder. For example, setting r.ScreenPercentage=85 renders at 85% resolution, acting as a manual form of resolution scaling.

Some games also have a benchmark or FPS limit setting. Capping your FPS slightly below your monitor's refresh rate (e.g., 141 FPS on a 144Hz display) can actually reduce GPU heat and stutter compared to uncapped rendering.

11. Upgrade RAM and Check Dual-Channel Configuration

RAM plays a bigger role in gaming than many people realize, particularly when it comes to preventing stuttering and loading speeds. More importantly, how your RAM is configured matters.

Running RAM in dual-channel mode (two sticks instead of one) can significantly improve integrated GPU performance and also helps the CPU feed data to the dedicated GPU faster. Many budget laptops ship with a single RAM stick, leaving performance on the table.

If your laptop has an upgradeable RAM slot, adding a second identical stick to enable dual-channel is one of the best hardware upgrades you can make. Check your laptop's specs or open it up to see if there's a free slot.

Also check how much RAM your system has. 8GB can be a bottleneck in modern games, especially if Windows and background apps are consuming 3–4GB of that before the game even starts. 16GB is the current sweet spot for gaming.

12. Consider Repasting the CPU and GPU

Over time — or straight from the factory on budget laptops — the thermal paste between the CPU/GPU and their heatsinks can dry out, degrade, or be applied poorly, causing temperatures to rise unnecessarily.

Replacing the thermal paste with a quality compound like Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut or Arctic MX-6 can drop temperatures by 10–20°C in severe cases. This is more of an advanced step that requires opening the laptop and some comfort with hardware, but for older laptops with high temperatures, it's often the single most effective thermal improvement available.

If you're not comfortable doing this yourself, a local repair shop can typically do it for a small fee.

Putting It All Together

No single fix will magically transform a budget laptop into a gaming powerhouse, but the combination of these steps can make a substantial real-world difference. Start with the quick wins: plug in your charger, set the power plan, update drivers, switch to the dedicated GPU, and lower your graphics settings. Then work through the thermal solutions — cooling pad, vent cleaning, fan curves — since sustained performance depends entirely on keeping temperatures under control.

For most laptops, following this guide in full can realistically add 20–50% more usable FPS compared to a default, unoptimized setup. That can be the difference between an unplayable 30 FPS and a smooth 45–60 FPS, or between 60 FPS and a fluid 90+.

Work smart with the hardware you have, and it will go a lot further than you might expect.