New Graphics Card Too Expensive? 10 Ways to Squeeze More Performance From Your GPU
Good luck snagging a current-gen graphics card at a fair price these days. These simple tricks can help pump up your frame rates and keep your old card chugging a little longer.
If you’re one of the millions of people who have tried—and failed—to purchase a new graphics card this year, you probably already know this tale of tech woe. As the supply squeeze for semiconductors trundles on through the first half of 2021 with no signs of slowing, many buyers simply have no good way to get their hands on a new GPU at a reasonable price. (After all, who wants to resort to renting a bot?)
Supply-side semiconductor shortages, rises in the value of cryptocurrencies, and an overall increased demand for electronics during the COVID-19 pandemic have all converged to send GPU prices shooting far north of their proposed list prices—if you can find certain models at all. So if you’re not content to support the scalping economy (and its absurd prices), until some semblance of normalcy returns you need to know: What tricks and techniques can you use to squeeze the most out of a card you already own?
Let’s check out some of the most common options for gamers who are waiting for that elusive dose of sanity to heal the GPU market. It may take a while.
1. Tweak Your In-Game Settings
First up, the obvious stuff. If you’re having trouble running your favorite games at your preferred frame rate, the initial step to take is to tweak your in-game graphics settings downward in quality, or to reduce the overall resolution, to increase the overall frame-per-second (fps) rate.
In general, the most taxing elements for a GPU to render in a game tend to be the anti-aliasing quality and texture quality. These two settings can usually be turned up or down through a series of “levels.” But whether you have this option, and what form it takes, depends on the game.
For example, in the popular AAA title Red Dead Redemption 2, you’ll see four anti-aliasing options: TAA (temporal anti-aliasing), FXAA (fast-approximate), MSAA (multi-sampling), and None. Each of these comes with its own benefits and drawbacks, and the performance impact of each setting will vary depending on the GPU you’re using to power the game.
The best way, in this circumstance, to see how to get more performance out of your current GPU would be to run the in-game benchmark test at each anti-aliasing level, along with applying any other settings adjustments you care to make, and comparing the results in a systematic way. You’ll want to change just one variable at a time. Only select games have built in benchmark tests, though; in the case of RDR 2, it’s under the graphics settings menu. (See how we test graphics cards.) Be sure to mark down both the performance numbers (measured in fps) and to observe the visual quality to see if it rests in a place you’re happy to call “good enough for now.”
If the title you’re trying to tune lacks an in-game benchmark, you can use a tool like FRAPS to help record your frame rate and make adjustments accordingly. (Hit the link for a primer on how to use FRAPS, but bear in mind that you need to use the same run-through or methodology for each test, or else the frame-rate comparisons will not be meaningful.)
In sum, this give-and-take applies to every setting in your game, whether it’s the anti-aliasing intensity, the texture quality, the shadow level, or something else. There’s no going around the basic laws of GPU scaling here: the more settings you turn down in order to gain in frames, the worse a game will look. The more of them you turn up, the harder the GPU works and the more heat is issued. Thermodynamics are a pain!
However, things have started to change in recent years with a few innovative approaches to that age-old problem. Take DRS, for one.
2. Engage Dynamic Resolution Scaling, If You Can
Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) is a recently introduced feature that has just started to gain traction in the mainstream, as more and more developers look to offer ways to run their games at optimal frame rates on sub-optimal hardware.
DRS is available only on a game-by-game basis, meaning that it has to be an option in your game’s menu to be turned on. It works to increase your frame rate by dynamically adjusting the render resolution of a scene depending on the number of elements onscreen. In non-technojargon? The more stuff the GPU is being asked to render, the more it will downrender that image to keep frame rates above a consistent level.
For example, you’re in a small hallway with just a few enemies visible. That’s an easy task for your GPU to handle, resulting in higher frame rates. Step out into a wide vista with more enemies, spaceships shooting down from the sky, and tracers everywhere? The frame rate tanks.
DRS solves for this, and while it’s not always the best option for getting higher frame rates out of your card, it will help to provide a more consistent frame rate throughout various scenes and set pieces. Want to try it out? Simply check your game settings for a DRS toggle and flip it on.
3. Got a Radeon Card? Consult Your Settings Advisor
For owners of AMD Radeon cards who can’t decide which settings they want to sacrifice in the service of higher frame rates, the latest version of the company’s Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition (which is its GPU-management and performance-monitoring suite) comes with what the company is calling its Radeon Settings Advisor (RSA).
RSA is part of the full Radeon suite. It’s a real-time reporting system that tracks how well a game performs on your current setup. Just as important: It makes automatic suggestions for which settings can be tweaked to provide the best visual experience at a more consistent frame rate.
This takes a bit more of the guesswork out of the equation, though we’d always recommend that you tune your game to your own visual preference before taking the advice of a method governed by artificial intelligence. The reason why? Coming right up.
4. Image Sharpeners: Radeon Image Sharpening, Nvidia Freestyle, and ReShade
That reason is image sharpeners. Gaining in popularity over the past few years, “sharpeners” like Nvidia’s Freestyle apply a secondary filter over your game to clean up any rough edges that might be introduced when you turn down the render resolution or anti-aliasing level.
AMD’s Radeon Image Sharpening (RIS), on the other hand, is a bit more advanced. Rather than simply applying a flat filter over the entirety of the image, RIS applies an algorithm called Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), which uses different elements in a scene to determine which edges need to be sharpened, and which of them can be left alone.
CAS has the distinct advantage of being open source, giving anyone with any graphics card (AMD or Nvidia!)the option to turn on the feature as long as the game natively supports it. The feature has been patched into many of the games that we use for benchmarking new video cards.
In our testing, we found that on average, gamers can crank their render resolution down as much as 35% with RIS enabled without seeing a noticeable degradation in image quality, which translates to a 35% increase in frames per second. Nvidia’s Freestyle isn’t as forgiving, though, and RIS generally produced better image quality throughout, thanks to its more targeted approach to the problem.
In the case of these sharpeners, turning them on is generally a simple toggle in supported games. The question is whether a given game supports the technology, and which one(s).
5. Another Perk for AMD Card Owners: Radeon Boost
If you have a Radeon RX 400 card or newer, the AMD Radeon Boost setting is an interesting way to get a higher average frame rate and reduced latency out of some of today’s most popular multiplayer games. Much like DRS, Radeon Boost uses the movement of your mouse to determine when you’re rapidly turning your character in such a way that a bit of video-card corner-cutting won’t be noticeable.
Think of it like this. When you’re going for what’s commonly referred to as a “flick shot” in a multiplayer shoot-’em-up, you’re rapidly moving your mouse from one part of the screen to another to try and focus in on the head of your enemy as quickly as possible. In these situations, having a higher frame rate is more important than how good that head looks when you click on it.
Radeon Boost adaptively down-renders the resolution of the game while the camera is in motion. providing a momentary “boost” to your frame rate. Once you stop moving the mouse, the game reverts to rendering at its native resolution.
We’ve tried the feature for ourselves over multiple demos, and while it can provide a substantial average uplift to your frame rate, its limited support (less than two dozen games know how to use it) prevents it from being the sort of “catch-all” bonus that AMD owners might be looking for.
Still, the list of Radeon Boost-enabled games includes some very heavy hitters:
- Apex Legends
- Borderlands 3
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
- Call of Duty: WWII
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Destiny 2
- Fallout 76
- Fortnite
- Grand Theft Auto V
- Metro Exodus
- Overwatch
- PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
- Resident Evil 3
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Sniper Elite 4
- Warframe
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
For the esports set who play one of the games on this list, in the right circumstances it could be worth the cost of entry. And speaking of a high cost of entry…
6. Turn on DLSS…If You Can (GeForce RTX Owners Only)
So, you lucked into an Nvidia 20 Series graphics card with an “RTX” badge on it before supply dried up and prices on both the 20 Series and the newer GeForce RTX 30 Series went into orbit? Then, by far, using DLSS is the fastest and easiest way to get more performance out of the Nvidia graphics card you already own. With one big caveat.
DLSS is, for lack of a more complicated technical explanation in the service of time, magic. The technology employs artificial intelligence to smooth out aliasing in games. In our testing, we’ve seen that it can increase your frame rates by as much as 70 percent in select cases, without any discernible impact on the visual quality of your game.
That big catch? DLSS has seen only limited implementation in games, and the game has to support it for you to engage it. As of this writing in April 2021, DLSS 2.0 (the only version worth using, in this humble benchmarker’s opinion) is available in fewer than three dozen titles. If you regularly play one of the enabled games, such as Call of Duty: Warzone, the boost is undeniable, however.
Quite literally in the middle of writing this story, a DLSS 2.0 update went out for the new COD: Warzone mode, and the reactions are already pouring in (specifically from yours truly): This is the future of gaming. Unfortunately, it’s still, indeed, mostly the future for now. (The only other games pushed in this update were Bladepoint and Mortal Shell, hardly the blockbuster global 100-million-player phenomena that is COD: Warzone.)
We expect this to change in the coming years, though, as Nvidia recently announced DLSS base integration with both Unreal Engine 4 and Unity, two of the most commonly employed game engines in circulation today. Until then, though, considering that the technology is limited both by the number of games as well as by the specific cards it will work on (that is, GeForce RTX ones only), it just isn’t an everyday option for most people.
Users should know that for a lot of the aforementioned tech, DLSS is an “all or none” situation. It overrides your choices on anti-aliasing, DRS, or the option to enable AMD’s FidelityFX CAS. That said, we don’t mind handing over control of those settings in exchange for 60% or more frames per second in COD: Warzone with nothing more than a firmware patch and a software update. That’s money not spent on a new video card that you could put toward a higher-resolution monitor, and still not see a drop in frames because DLSS would be picking up the slack all the way up the chain.
DLSS is finally, after a turbulent start, beginning to show some maturity in its space. If you own a GeForce RTX card, then DLSS (if supported in a given game) should always be your first and last resort to find any extra performance hiding in the virtual GPU couch cushions. If it’s supported, just look for the toggle in the game’s menus and turn it on.
7. Tweak Two Key Windows 10 Settings
For those on Windows 10, two settings buried in the Graphics Settings section of your Display Settings window, VRS and Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling, could help you eke out a few extra frames in certain games that support either feature. To get to them, right-click on the Windows desktop, choose Display Settings, then scroll down to the very bottom and click Graphics Settings. (If you don’t see them, make sure your installation of Windows 10 is current via Windows Update.)
Turn on Variable Rate Shading
The first is Variable Rate Shading (VRS), a newer technique that works in just two games you can play at the time of this writing: Gears 5, and Gears Tactics. If either of those are your thing (and they very well may be, as one of them earned our Editors’ Choice award), you can see the benefit of this new technology. It changes the way that shaders are calculated, in so few words.
Not a Gears geek? Read on.
Turn on Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling
Another minor buff in the world of GPUs came about more recently, in the May 2020 Windows 10 update. It applied changes to what’s known as the “GPU scheduler,” which is basic terminology in the instruction set that tells your GPU how much or how little power to use for any particular task. The GPU scheduler in Windows has been the same all the way back to the days of Windows Vista, and it was just recently updated as a part of the Windows 10 2004 feature build.
We haven’t tested the feature for ourselves, but other outlets have all come to the same conclusion, thus far: It’s mildly helpful, but it’s still too early to tell how big a deal it will be longer-term. Games launched prior to the latest May 2020 update were designed with the original GPU scheduler in mind, meaning that they wouldn’t even know how to take advantage of the optimizations if they could.
Even with optimizations, it’s believed that the primary beneficiary of the technology will be games that can leverage CPU six cores or more, such as Grand Theft Auto V or Civilization VI. If you play either of these games regularly, you could see a small percentage gain by turning it on, but again, this feature is reserved to fringe cases.
8. Have a Drink at the Resizable BAR
Another recently introduced feature, Resizable BAR, has actually been sitting in the depths of beta BIOS builds on motherboards for a while now. (It’s also known as Smart Access Memory, or SAM, on AMD-based systems.) Just recently, it got flipped on as the emergence of PCI Express 4.0 buses on motherboards have allowed for a more efficient communication pipe to open up between compatible CPUs and GPUs.
The feature first made its appearance during the launch of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 Series of graphics cards. When we tested the feature then, it provided only a small bump overall, with frame results that were up to 8% faster in certain cases. This often wasn’t enough to help the RX 6700 XT keep up with its Nvidia competition (specifically the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition) in DirectX 11 games, though.
Speaking of which, if you plan to play lots of games that use DirectX 11, err on the side of caution. Stick with your Nvidia card, if you’ve got one, to get the best possible frame rates in those games until drivers for the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 Series GPUs shake out in future updates.
Turning on Resizable BAR or SAM, if you’re able, happens in the BIOS, and it requires late-model components, so it may be less useful for folks with older hardware they are trying to extend the life of. It also may require updates to the motherboard and possibly the video card firmware. Check your motherboard manufacturer’s website for the appropriate BIOS updates required, as well as instructions on where to find the toggle for your specific model. Once again, our Resizable BAR primer has much more on the compatibility issues.
9. And Then There Was Overclocking
Though it has been diminished in effectiveness in recent years, the oldest, most vetted method of getting more power out of your GPU is overclocking.
As cards have grown in power and complexity, the clock-speed ceiling that a GPU can reasonably expect to hit above its base rate has lessened, and card makers have gotten quite good at leaving little performance untapped in their designs. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get what you need out of your card in a pinch. Applications like AMD’s WattMan and Radeon Overclocking Software give an array of novice-friendly options to tune your graphics card. Nvidia users aren’t suffering for choice, either. They can use third-party software options such as MSI Afterburner and EVGA Precision X1, which tend to work with the widest array of third-party GeForce cards.
In our own reviews, we’ve seen cards like the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT that could comfortably stick at an overclock of nearly 25%. Whether or not that translates 1:1 into that much performance depends on the game, though. In our stock overclock testing, we saw that 25% overclock return around 10% faster frames in our test runs, on average. And that’s just on air cooling…
Buy a GPU Waterblock
One of the few classes of computer components that hasn’t seen a surge in cost over the past year are coolers. Specifically in the case of GPUs, that means closed-loop liquid cooling systems with GPU waterblock adapters. While that may sound like a mouthful, what you’re getting is pretty basic: the same kind of water cooling you’d attach to a CPU, except with a customized block designed to fit over a specific GPU. (GPU waterblocks are model-dependent, designed to interface with and mount on specific video card PCBs.)
GPU liquid cooling is a reliable, if expensive, way to significantly reduce the temperatures of your GPU to a point where you can overclock by multiples more than what’s possible with traditional air cooling. Some all-in-one (AIO) liquid GPU cooling systems are going for as low as $70 right now on Amazon, and though your costs will vary depending on the card, it will likely still be far less than the price of even a new, current-generation midrange GPU right now.
The best part, though? Once you finally do get the new graphics card you’ve been waiting for, in most cases you’ll only have to swap out the waterblock for the new backplate, while keeping the rest of the liquid cooling system intact. This means even more performance out of your new GPU, and cooler operating temperatures all around. Who wouldn’t like that? (Check out our GPU overclocking primer for much more on how to actually pull off a graphics overclock.)
10. Always Tune for Your Own Eyes
Settings advice and extra card- and game-specific features are all well and good. But ultimately only you know how well you can actually see anything. When turning down settings on your favorite games to allow your GPU to catch up, you’ll be the best and only judge of what can be sacrificed and what stays, in the end.
Books have been written about the phenomenon of “pixel pitch,” and you can read an abridged version in our roundup of the best 4K monitors. It comes down to this: Are you nearsighted, farsighted, or astigmatic? Use trifocals or bifocals? Have 4K monitor, or a 1080p one? All of the above? None? The list of variables that go into “what a monitor looks like to you, specifically” goes on, and on, and on.
The first step in determining your personal display perception? Start with tools like these from workstation maker Puget Systems to decide what monitor is right for your vision first, and then work backward from there. After that, it’s all about coloring in personal preference during the tuning process. Depending on your eyes, and your visual tastes, you’ll be able to tell whether to sacrifice shadows for textures, allow for worse anti-aliasing for higher draw distance, turn on RIS or not, and so on.
Ultimately it’s about however the game looks best to you, or at least keeps you competitive without sacrificing speed, if that’s your thing. For some, that’ll mean an insistence on frame rates that lock above a buttery-smooth 144fps; others won’t settle for less than an elite 360fps. Many won’t need more than 60fps at 4K, and some won’t be happy until their 8K TV is running at 120Hz.
Conclusion: All Hope Isn’t Lost, Folks!
Sure, the GPU market is a bloodbath for buyers these days, and reports from vendors, manufacturers, foundries, and fabricators all suggest that the high prices we’re seeing on first- and second-hand GPUs won’t be going down anytime soon. Still, factor in and apply every relevant optimization and setting tweak we’ve mentioned here, and you could see significant gains on your frame rates using the hardware you already own. For example, if you applied DRS, Hardware GPU scheduling, Resizable BAR, and a RIS sharpening level of around 35% (with an equal downrender applied), you could expect a considerable boostto your performance.
Alternately, depending on the game and if you have the right GeForce card, Nvidia GeForce RTX owners could just flip on DLSS 2.0 for an instant boost, save their bucks, and wait in earnest to see what an eventual, ostensible Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 can do in Ultra Performance mode cranked to the max.
Again, it should be stressed that your results will vary. Dozens of factors are at work here, and those can change depending on the game you’re playing, the hardware you’re playing on, the version of Windows you run, whether it’s cold or hot outside…again, the list goes on. But in today’s video card marketplace, driven by soulless bots pumping up prices, trying anything is still better than nothing.
All that said, if you’re determined to keep trying to get an all-new GPU for yourself, we’ve drummed up a series of guides that can help you find a GPU at a fair price. Or, if you’re really, really desperate, fight fire with fire and check out how we joined the ranks of the bots. (Why not let the machines do the hard part for you, right?)
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
