How to optimise Windows 11 for gaming
With just a few tweaks your old Win 10 gaming PC is now a speedy Win 11 box.
01 Uncheck ‘Enhance pointer precision’
Whether or not you have acceleration disabled in the bundled software of your chosen gaming mouse, it’s possible that Windows is still adding a little into the mix. The ‘Enhance pointer precision’ feature is handy to have enabled on a laptop, keeping your trackpad usable, but on a desktop gaming setup it’s worth turning off to make sure there is no acceleration in any of your games.
Hit the Win key on your keyboard, type Mouse, and it will bring up the relevant screen from Settings. From here click on Additional mouse settings and it will open up one of those ancient Windows dialogue boxes that haven’t been redesigned since forever. Click on the Pointer Options tab and uncheck the Enable pointer precision box at the top.
It’s worth noting that a lot of games will utilise raw input, which will ignore any software acceleration Windows might add, but that doesn’t cover everything and you may find some MOBA or RTS games especially don’t feature it. 02 Enable ‘Game Mode’
Yes, you read that right. You should enable Game Mode. Microsoft has worked hard on the feature over the last six months or so to ensure any of the previous stuttering or input lag that has plagued it in the past is a fading memory. Now you can enable it without impacting performance, and avoid Windows trying to pop up with notifications, or driver updates, or deciding to restart on a whim.
Hit the Win key, type Game Mode, and then make sure the feature is enabled. It likely will be by default, but I do know some people will disable it almost because of muscle memory at this point. 03 Check GPU priorities on games
A feature that Windows 11 now surfaces is the ability to assign GPU priorities on a per-application basis. On a desktop rig, with a single graphics card that’s maybe not such a big deal, as the High performance and Power saving modes only have one GPU option anyway. But, for a gaming laptop, which will have both, ensuring you’re definitely using the right graphics silicon for the job is useful.
Not only for making sure you’re using the discrete GPU for high performance gaming, but also, if you’re on the move, being able to have a particular game only launch with the integrated graphics will save you battery. That’s something I do with Football Manager on my laptop anyway to save battery, but this will mean I don’t have to dig around the
Nvidia Control Panel to do it.
Hit the Win key and type Graphics. Then you can either go through the list of apps on the screen, or browse your PC to add a particular app on your system. Then click the app you want to prioritise in the list, hit Options, and then check whichever GPU option you would like that app to use and click Save.
Future Windows 11 updates will also give you a check box option to Don’t use Auto HDR for any games that don’t play nice with the new feature. 04 Disable ‘Record what happened’
If you’re into your game capture then chances are that you’ve already got a favourite app for that. Whether you’re a die-hard OBS fan, or happy to go with AMD or Nvidia’s driver-based capture settings, you can probably ignore the one baked into Windows.
Hit the Win key, type Capture and that will take you to the Gaming > Captures dialogue in settings. The main thing to do is make sure Record what happened is disabled as that will ensure Windows isn’t recording things in the background along with Nvidia or AMD.
05 Disable unnecessary apps in Startup
A classic part of getting Windows running nicely, whether you’re talking about gaming or just general system performance, is ensuring the bloatware is managed. On a fresh install you probably won’t have a huge number of apps running on startup, but a few months down the line, after different drivers and peripheral apps are added to your system, it starts to fill up.
Right-click the Windows ‘start’ button and hit Task Manager. Then click the Startup tab and disable any software that you don’t want to launch when you login to Windows. To do that you simply have to highlight the relevant app (or irrelevant app, maybe) and click the big Disable button.
06 Check ‘Power Plan’
Finally, altering your Power Plan settings might help. Though, honestly, I’m not convinced on a desktop gaming PC that it’s that useful a setting to toy with. It’s another one of those old menus, but if you hit the Win key, type Power plan, and click Choose a power plan, it’ll allow you to pick which plan you want. It can unleash a little extra power from your system, but in these days of dynamic, thermal-based component performance, there’s a chance that letting a specific chip draw as much power as it wants could mean it hits a thermal limit quicker and throttles performance sooner.
In my testing, with a Core i9 10900K, switching between Balanced and High Performance mode made little actual difference to performance, which couldn’t be simply explained away by way of variance in testing. I would suggest that realistically leaving this setting on Balanced makes the most sense.