Although gaming on laptops has dramatically improved, their design still imposes limitations. Their compact and portable nature restricts power and causes heating issues. With laptop limitations in mind, I bring you 8 tips to improve gaming on laptops.
Optimize Power Options
Whether you want more power or want to save battery and minimize heat, there are a bunch of settings in Windows Power options to help you achieve your goals. To access power options, search for “edit power” and select Edit power plan.
Here click on Change advanced power settings and adjust the below-mentioned power settings:
Integrated Graphics Settings
This setting controls the output of your integrated graphics card. It won’t affect games too much if your laptop has a dedicated graphics card too, but it’s worth adjusting this setting. You can choose Maximum Battery Life, Balanced, and Maximum Performance settings for it.
Processor Power Management
You can use this option to control CPU speed, here’s what to do:
- For performance: set both Minimum processor state and Maximum processor state to 100%.
- To minimize heat and battery drain: Set the Minimum processor state to 5% and decrease the Maximum processor state by 5-10% and check if it can still handle your gaming needs. Find a middle ground where your laptop CPU runs at a lower speed without affecting your game performance too much.
Also, the System cooling policy option should always be set to Active for gaming to better manage heat.
Switchable Dynamic Graphics
For laptops with a dedicated graphics card, usually both integrated and dedicated graphics cards work together to manage the load. This option manages which one is prioritized for tasks. For gaming, I will recommend you to set it to Maximum performance or Optimize performance. Selecting power saving will heavily impact your gaming performance.
Dedicated Graphics Power Settings
This also mainly controls which graphics card is used to manage tasks on your laptop. You have to adjust this option too to manage your graphics card priority. Maximum performance will be best for gaming, and for more granular control; the Switchable Dynamic Graphics setting is better.
Manage Game FPS
Just because your laptop can run your game at high FPS (frames per second), doesn’t mean you need to always run the game at the max FPS possible. You don’t always need high FPS to play the games.
The higher you set the FPS, the more your laptop has to work harder to deliver those frames. This means it will drain the battery faster and generate more heat, while you may not even need such a high FPS.
For some competitive titles, you might want 144 or more FPS, but for most games, 60 FPS is enough for smooth gameplay. You can even get by fine with 30 FPS for some turn-based strategy games.
You should manually adjust FPS in-game so that it is enough to offer smooth gameplay without any hindrance. Most games have dedicated settings to manage FPS under the graphics options.
Manage Display Refresh Rate
Similar to FPS, your laptop display has a refresh rate which controls how often it refreshes the displayed image. The FPS is bound to the display’s refresh rate as your laptop display can’t show FPS beyond the supported refresh rate.
Like FPS, your laptop has to dedicate resources to refresh the display. If you have an unnecessarily high refresh rate, it’s a waste of resources that consumes more battery and generates heat.
To manage the refresh rate in Windows, right-click on an empty space on the desktop and select Display settings.
Scroll down at the bottom and click on Advanced display settings.
You will see the Refresh rate section here where the laptop’s supported refresh rates are listed. You should try to select a refresh rate here that is near the FPS at which you will play your games.
I personally limit the refresh rate to 48Hz and enable V-sync in games that don’t have the option to select an FPS value between 30 and 60. It offers smooth gameplay for less action-heavy games while keeping the laptop cool.
Update Graphics Card Drivers
Up-to-date device drivers are very important, especially for laptops with dedicated graphics cards. Laptops need to manage both integrated and dedicated graphics cards and find balance. Since it’s a much more complicated process, they often receive driver updates fixing issues.
Unfortunately, Windows does a sloppy job of keeping drivers up-to-date. You should either use your driver manufacturer’s official software or a third-party driver updater tool. These tools usually offer the latest drivers and automatically update them.
I recommend IObit Driver Booster as even its free version can detect all outdated drivers and update them with one click.
Optimize Network Settings
If you play online games often, then you need to make sure you have a lower ping to stay competitive. On laptops, most people play games on a Wi-Fi connection, which adds a bit of delay by default. Therefore, optimizing the network becomes even more important. TCP Optimizer is a great tool for this purpose that can apply lots of network optimizations automatically.
All you have to do is select Optimal in TCP Optimizer and apply changes to get an improved network connection. Do this for both general and advanced settings. For overall PC network optimizations, refer to this guide on how to optimize network connection in Windows.
Decrease Game Resolution
Whether you are looking for a performance boost or lower heat generation, slightly decreasing game resolution can greatly lower the pressure on your laptop’s resources.
Resolution is the total number of pixels horizontally and vertically. The higher the resolution, the more detailed the image is due to the increased number of pixels. This also means your GPU will have to work harder to render those pixels. A lower resolution might result in less detailed images, but it will be easier for your GPU to produce them.
By default, games run at your laptop’s current display resolution, which is usually the highest your laptop supports. You can decrease the resolution in the game’s graphics settings. For example, if your current resolution is 1920×1080, try 1600×900.
Undervolt CPU
If heat generation and high battery use while gaming is your concern, then undervolting your CPU will help. Using the right tools, you can limit the power that is supplied to your CPU. This will not affect its performance, but it will lower heat generation and battery consumption.
The process itself is a bit difficult and requires a lot of experiments. For Intel CPUs, see the guide on how to use Throttlestop to undervolt the CPU. AMD CPU users can undervolt using the Ryzen Master tool.
Keep in mind that laptops have much lesser headroom for undervolting, so make sure you make tiny adjustments when experimenting.
Control Fan Speed
For managing heat generation on your laptop, manually managing the fans can be quite effective. By default, laptop BIOS is usually not very aggressive with cooling as fans can create a lot of noise and drain the battery faster. You can manually adjust the fan speed to cool down your laptop more efficiently.
I recommend using the SpeedFan tool. Launch the app and let it detects all the fans.
For quickly increasing/decreasing fan speed, adjust the percentage next to Pwm for all fans. For better managing automatic control, click on Configure.
Move to the Speeds tab and select the fan you want to configure. Set its Minimum value a bit higher for the fan to work faster even on slightly higher temperature increases. I recommend 50%, but you can add whatever you find right. Keep Maximum value to 100% and Automatically variated option checked.
This should keep your laptop cool by being more aggressive with the fan speed control.
I will also recommend using a cooling pad when gaming, especially if your laptop has a dedicated GPU and a lot of heat. Additionally, if you play online games often, learn how a Gaming VPN can help keep the ping low and stable.
Image credit: Freepik. All screenshots by Karrar Haider.
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