Gadgetory

since the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox one came out your five-year-old gaming PC may be beginning to feel like a gaming relic but the great thing about gaming on the PC is the inherent flexibility and we're gonna explore that flexibility as I show you three ways to enhance your PC's gaming performance solution one upgrade your graphics card drivers this is the simplest way to increase your performance so it's a Skyrim and it's running at medium settings in 1920 by 1080 resolution and as you can see it's running pretty smoothly this isn't the most taxing game and also I don't have a settings set too high but you can always use better performance and downloading the latest drivers can ensure that you're running as optimally as possible now our graphics card is an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX so we're gonna go to the Nvidia comm right click then click on the drivers go to GeForce drivers we're gonna select G for series 9 because that's what we have make sure we have windows 7 64 bit because that's what we're using and then we're gonna click start search now we're gonna click on the latest draft card drivers we're gonna click agree to download and now it's downloading so once it's downloaded we're gonna double click to install but yes okay all right so now we've installed the latest drivers and we're back in Skyrim we looking at the same scene we were looking at before and I'm not seeing much difference at all and that's the thing about graphics drivers you're not gonna see a huge dramatic difference by downloading the latest drivers however what they can do is make your game more compatible with your graphics hardware solution number two is to optimize your games settings now I have a game called sleeping dogs here running on my older brightest part with the latest graphics card drivers now today looks pretty good it's running at a decent framerate however the textures and lighting are set pretty high the lighting is pretty dramatic there's shadowing on the characters that you can see the shadows of the fans on the ceiling on the floor however it's not as smooth as I would like I feel like it's not as responsive as it should be like my button presses don't correspond one-to-one with my actions on screen now there are two ways to address this the first is to go into the actual game settings and change the settings manually the other way is to download an application that'll do it for you so we're gonna go into sleeping dogs display settings so we're gonna take the settings down to the lowest possible level or turn them completely off and then go through each one and take the settings off or take them to the lowest possible level and save the settings I'm gonna go back to the game so you see that these shadows are gone you don't see the fans shadows on the floor the detail in the backgrounds are gone and you don't see as much lighting on the characters however the game is a lot smoother it's more responsive to my button presses and it just feels from a gameplay perspective a lot a lot tighter okay this might be a little too plain for some of you however so what you can do you can go back to the settings and then start turning on different options one by one and seeing how they affect your game their goal should be to have a smooth experience well I'll still have an anesthetic LEEP easing game solution number three is to buy and install a new graphics card now this is the most dramatic way to increase your graphics card gaming performance but also the most costly graphics cards can cost anywhere from 150 till whopping $3,000 and of course the more you pay the more dramatic the performance increases are going to be now ideally you want your game to run about 60 frames per second however we have a six year old card here so we have to turn a lot of the graphical effects off so we run it at 30 frames per second here which is good for a gameplay not as optimal as 60 and also the game just isn't as pretty as it can be muddy textures simple lighting you don't even see a shadow below her there's no real lighting on top of hers all light Maps it's not real lighting so when it's kind of blowing in the background you see a little bit of mist but not much detail so what we're gonna do is we're gonna upgrade our rappers car in order to get better performance so now have the new graphics cart installed this is two meter running at the same exact settings as my old cart see that the detail is the same but the spring rate is much smoother what I'm gonna do now is turn the graphics settings all to their highest possible settings just to see it how far we can push this car with this game and wow that is a huge improve looking lighting look at her hair look at the textures and the frame rate holds up is really still smooth like her model just looks much more realistic than it did before and the lighting on her is also much more realistic and like I said just as smooth as it was on the old car with the really really low settings this is really impressive to tell the myths still the detail here looks really really nice even a detail of the dust and rubble kicking up on her feet they're like that now giving you three different options to help improve your PC gaming so hopefully one if not all of them will help you do just that you