You bought a $1500 GPU and you're still getting 90 FPS in Valorant? You're leaving performance on the table. This guide walks through every meaningful FPS optimization, ranked by impact.
The Big Ones (10+ FPS gain)
1. Enable Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS)
Settings → System → Display → Graphics → Change default graphics settings → toggle on. This moves frame scheduling from your CPU to your GPU, freeing CPU cycles and reducing input lag.
2. Switch to Ultimate Performance Power Plan
Windows ships with a hidden power plan called "Ultimate Performance" that disables CPU parking and removes throttling. It's easy to enable:
powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb613. Set Game Process Priority to High
In Task Manager → Details tab → right-click your game → Set Priority → High. This tells Windows to allocate more CPU time to your game when there's contention.
GPU Driver Tweaks
In NVIDIA Control Panel (or AMD Radeon Software), apply these:
- ›Power Management Mode: Prefer maximum performance
- ›Texture filtering - Quality: High performance
- ›Vertical sync: Off (use in-game V-Sync if needed, or G-Sync/FreeSync)
- ›Threaded optimization: On
- ›Low Latency Mode: Ultra
- ›Anisotropic filtering: Application-controlled
Background Bloat
Every program running in the background steals frames. Disable startup apps you don't need, especially:
- ›Discord (use the web version while gaming)
- ›Spotify (or set to low priority)
- ›NVIDIA GeForce Experience overlay
- ›Steam web helper (4+ instances at idle!)
- ›OneDrive sync
- ›Adobe Creative Cloud
Latency Killer's "FPS Boost" category bundles all 7 of the most impactful FPS tweaks — apply them with one click and gain 20-40 FPS instantly.