How to Fully Optimize Windows 11 For Gaming

Whether you just switched to Windows 11

or feel like your computer is running

slower than it should be, this is the

video for you. I've made many highly

rated optimization guides and tested

every one of these tweaks across

multiple desktops, laptops, and even

tablets using both Intel and AMD CPUs

and Nvidia AMD and Intel GPUs. And by

the end of this video, you will get

better FPS, lower input delay, and an

overall more responsive system without

having to spend money to upgrade your

PC. Let's start with the basics, the

essential Windows optimizations that I

do on every PC, regardless of the specs.

First, we're going to create our restore

point by pressing your Windows key,

typing in create, and pressing enter.

This way, if for some reason anything

goes wrong as you follow this video, you

can use this restore point to revert any

changes you've made. So, click on

configure, select turn on system

protection, and click okay. Now that

that's enabled, click create, give it a

name, and click on create again. And

shortly after, it should tell you that a

restore point has been created

successfully. So if something ever ends

up going wrong with your system, you can

simply use this restore point. After

you've created that restore point, you

can safely move on to the first

essential Windows optimizations, game

mode, OFWG, and hags. So press your

Windows key, type in game mode, press

enter to go into the game mode settings,

and enable game mode. In very basic

terms, it improves your stability by

making your CPU and GPU focus more on

foreground tasks like your game instead

of background tasks. In the same area,

click on graphics, then change default

graphics settings and enable

optimizations for windowed games. In

DX10 and DX11 games like Fortnite, this

setting allows you to use windowed full

screen while maintaining similar input

delay to exclusive full screen. If you

see hardware accelerated GPU scheduling

or hags here as well, I also recommend

turning that on. As a brief explanation,

GPU scheduling is normally done entirely

on the CPU, but with this on, the GPU

can schedule tasks for itself, which can

boost your average FPS and 1% lows, as

well as decrease your input latency

depending on the game. And obviously,

you're going to see the biggest

difference in CPU intensive games like

Fortnite and Counter-Strike now that the

CPU has less to do. However, you might

not see a performance impact in

primarily GPU intensive games, and at

worst, it can cause system instability

and stutters. but turn it back off if

you notice any of the mentioned issues

because again it depends entirely on the

games you play. Next, we're going to

disable core isolation. While Microsoft

has made improvements, independent

testing continues to show that memory

integrity, which uses

virtualizationbased security or VPS, can

cause between 2 to 5% less performance

in games. For a gaming PC, disabling

this could measurably increase your FPS.

And as long as you have Windows Defender

enabled or some other trusted antivirus,

you'll be more than fine. To disable it,

press your Windows key, type in core,

press enter, and toggle memory integrity

off. I recommend leaving everything else

alone as they don't make noticeable

performance impacts while keeping your

PC safer. However, you will need to

restart your PC to apply this change.

Now that you've disabled core isolation,

let's clean up your Windows bloatware by

using the latest version of the most

trusted debloating tool, the Chris Titus

Tech DBLOW utility. It's safe, super

userfriendly, and doesn't require a full

installation. So, even though you can

technically do all of this manually,

this will save you a ton of time and

headaches. So to run this utility on

your PC, press the Windows key, type

PowerShell, then click run as

administrator. This will not work

without admin privileges. Next, copy and

paste the first line from the

description and press enter. Make sure

you got the full line, not just the

link. In a few moments, a window similar

to this should pop up. When it does open

up, we're going to go straight to the

tweaks tab at the top. From here, in

essential tweaks, you can copy the left

side if you're on a desktop, and if

you're on a laptop or portable device,

copy the right side. But I still

recommend that you hover your mouse over

each tweak and read their description so

that you know exactly what everything

does. Moving on to the advanced tweaks

section. These are all technically safe

to use, but accidentally checking the

wrong ones will genuinely ruin your

Windows 11 experience. So here's what I

would do personally. First, I like to

leave Adobe Network Block unchecked so I

can actually use Adobe websites

properly. Adobe DBLow is perfectly fine

to use though. It will not affect your

experience using any of their apps. I

also recommend against checking set

display to performance because it makes

everything look like trash. We'll

manually adjust this later in the video

for better performance, but also not

ruining your Windows 11 experience.

Additionally, I highly recommend against

removing all Microsoft Store apps as it

completely removes useful apps like the

snipping tool, which I use all the time

to take screenshots. Once you're

satisfied with your selection of tweaks,

click run tweaks at the bottom. And

after a few minutes, depending on how

many tweaks you selected, this window

will pop up saying tweaks are finished.

So, you can close everything off. Next,

we're going to take a look at the power

plants because they can have a massive

impact on your performance. To find your

power plants, press the Windows key,

type power, and hit enter to open the

power options. Here is where you will

definitely want to spend 6 or 7 minutes

doing some quick and easy testing for

yourself because some of you may get

better results using different power

plants. Regardless, I'm going to show

you how to add a power plan called the

ultimate performance power plan, which

typically works the best on mid to

high-end gaming PCs. By default, the

ultimate power plan is nowhere to be

seen. So to get it, open command prompt

as administrator. Copy and paste this

line from the description and hit enter.

When you refresh the power options by

backing out and going back in. The new

power plan will show up in the

additional plans and you can select it.

To test different power plans out, it's

very easy because you don't have to

restart your PC after changing it. So it

barely takes any time to test all four

main power plans. All you have to do is

run a benchmark for your favorite game

using each plan and see which one gets

the best performance for you. For most

of you, that's going to be the ultimate

power plan that we added. But for some,

maybe sticking to the balance plan will

work the best. Whatever the case is, you

can now game happily knowing that you

picked the best power plan for you. Next

up are the Nvidia GPU optimizations. AMD

users, you can skip to the next chapter

of the video. Now, I often hear people

say that tweaking the Nvidia control

panel doesn't make a real difference,

but even Nvidia's own guys will tell you

that that isn't true. And from my own

testing, the performance boost you gain

just by spending a minute changing these

settings is undeniable. To open NVCP,

right click on your desktop and click on

Nvidia Control Panel. If this is your

first time, it's going to ask you to

agree to some terms and conditions, but

after agreeing to that, it will bring

you to this page. On this page, find

manage 3D settings on the left side of

the window, and we're going to change

eight of these to increase your

performance. The first three of eight

that I'm going to talk about are pretty

much always going to give you better

performance if you change them from

their default settings. Starting with

the OpenGL rendering GPU, just set that

to whatever GPU you want to use while

gaming. This is key for certain OpenGL

games, software, and emulation. It just

prevents Windows from using the wrong

GPU, which doesn't happen often, but

when it does, you'll wish you changed

this setting earlier. The second one

that everyone should change is

increasing your shader cache size to 10

GB. The reason we use 10 GB is because

if the driver default is, let's say, 4

GB and you fill that up, your PC is

going to start deleting shaders to free

up space for new ones. Meaning that if

you ever go back into an area in the

game where you needed that deleted

shader again, your game could stutter.

Why not switch it to 100, you might be

asking? Well, unless you're benchmarking

literally thousands of games every week.

Uh, you're never even going to get close

to using 100 gigabytes. I can promise

you that. And finally, the last setting

that everyone should change is turning

vertical sync off. All this setting does

is eliminate screen tearing while

destroying your latency. So, definitely

keep it off for a better experience.

These next five settings depend on both

your system configuration as well as

personal preferences. So, change these

settings accordingly. Anti-aliasing

gamma correction doesn't come at any

performance cost, but you may want to

turn it off for sharper edges, making it

easier to make out objects in

competitive games. Or you might want to

leave it on for more accurate images in

your single player games. But again,

this doesn't affect your FPS, so it's

purely about personal preference. Next

is arguably the most important setting

for competitive gamers, low latency

mode. Because, as you could probably

expect, it makes a huge difference on

latency, but can come at the cost of

your FPS on lower-end hardware. Now,

here's the most important part. If your

game supports Nvidia Reflex, you should

enable Reflex in the game settings.

Reflex is a smarter, more advanced

technology that does the same job, but

more efficiently, and it will

automatically override this control

panel setting. However, if your game

does not support Reflex or you do not

use it, be sure to try changing this to

on or ultra. Just be aware that ultra

can be more demanding on your components

and can affect your FPS negatively in

some CPU intensive games, and you will

have to restart your game to apply these

changes. Something that can affect your

FPS extremely positively is switching

your power management mode to prefer

maximum performance. Based on my

testing, this setting alone is super

good for increasing your 1% lows, but

outside of that, it really doesn't do

much. Clock speeds, temperatures,

everything else stays pretty much about

the same. Basically, turn this on for

the most consistent gaming experience.

But if you're on a laptop or use your PC

for a lot of browsing or lowintensity

tasks, you'll probably have more success

if you leave this on normal. For the

last two settings, you want to decrease

your texture filtering quality down to

high performance. With this setting on

high performance, I saw improvements

across the board in basically every

game. And for anotropic sample

optimization, I definitely recommend

individually testing this one from the

other settings because it's a little bit

of a mixed bag. Like in Rocket League,

for example, having it off is actually

better. And to wrap things up, you

should always feel free to tweak these

based on your specific needs. And there

is also a very accessible reset to

default button as well. For AMD users,

these GPU optimizations not only boosted

my 1% lows significantly, but also

reduced my RAM and VRAM usage by an

entire gigabyte each. So, if you want

results like these, start, of course, by

opening up your AMD software. Click the

settings cog at the top right, then

click on preferences. Disable absolutely

everything so you don't have stupid

overlays running in the background. Same

thing with the hotkeys, unless you use

them, of course. Next, click on gaming,

then graphics. This is where we're going

to make the most changes. On texture

filtering quality, change it from

standard to performance to prioritize

performance over image quality. If you

find that it makes your game look worse,

change it back. Surface format

optimization is the main reason why I

get significantly less VRAM usage with

my optimized settings. So, definitely

turn this on, especially if you play

VRAMm hungry games, because it'll

literally allow you to use higher

quality settings if you ran into low

memory issues before. For tessellation

mode, leave it alone if you mainly play

single player games. But for comp

sweats, we're going to override the

settings and set our maximum

tessellation level to off. And that's it

for that. Time for a quick sweep through

the settings app to disable

non-essential features. And

unfortunately, even if you've done this

before, Windows updates will silently

reenable some of these settings behind

your back. For example, I literally

turned all of this off in the last

Windows optimization guide I made, and

somehow they got turned on again. So

yeah, treat this more as a checklist so

you know your PC is running the settings

you want it to. Let's begin by opening

the settings app by pressing Windows

plus I. Starting with the system

settings, click on system on the left,

then notifications. As I've said before,

notifications themselves don't

measurably affect your performance.

Maybe like a kilobyte of RAM and a

fraction of a percent of your CPU. But

the processes that manage the

notifications definitely can affect your

performance. So, to avoid any of this

hassle and to not be bothered during

your very intense gaming sessions, you

should disable notifications. On the

left, click on Bluetooth and services.

There's a minuscule chance that having

Bluetooth could affect your Wi-Fi or USB

connections. And although that's never

happened to me, there's still no point

in enabling Bluetooth unless you're

actively using it. Then click on

personalization on the left, then

dynamic lighting. If you didn't know,

this is basically a background app that

manages your RGB lighting, which can

conflict with other RGB software. Turn

these two settings off unless you use

it. Now, go to apps, advanced app

settings, share across devices, and turn

it off unless for some reason you need

it on. Next, go back to apps and click

on startup apps. Don't feel pressured

like you need to disable everything.

Even I have quite a few on. But if

there's anything that you don't want to

open on startup, you should turn those

off. Now, click on accessibility

settings on the left. Go to visual

effects and disable both transparency

and animation effects. While this

matters less if you're in the minority

and play games on exclusive full screen

instead of windowed full screen, this is

still a set it and forget it type of

thing, so you should probably just

disable it. Continuing with privacy and

security settings, quickly go through

every subsection, beginning with general

all the way down to diagnostics and

feedback for better privacy and

security. Uh, you might be wondering

where activity history went. We usually

always talk about that in these types of

videos, but they actually remove those

settings as of October 2025. Anyways,

like I always say, you should always

read up on what everything does in case

you do want to leave some of these on.

But yeah, definitely turn most of these

off. Moving on to the search tab,

formerly search permissions, have

everything off, but definitely enable

enhanced file searching. If you don't

have an absolute potato PC with a one

core CPU, you should use enhanced. But

at the end of the day, it's up to you.

Finally, for the last section in the

settings, find Windows update on the

left, click advanced options and have

these four things off to keep Bill Gates

from breaking into your house and

stealing your cookies. Then go to

delivery optimization and turn off allow

downloads from other devices. By turning

this off, you just made sure that your

Windows updates come directly from

Microsoft servers instead of other

people's devices. You also potentially

increase your update speeds and

prevented your PC from sending your data

to other random people on the internet.

Now, we're going to disable some

advanced system settings. And

ironically, these are very simple to

change. Now, I'll be honest, this isn't

going to give you a big FPS boost like

some of the other tweaks we did, but

it's still worth doing to free up some

CPU and RAM cycles in under 30 seconds.

If that sounds good to you, press your

Windows key and type view advanced, then

enter. Under performance, click on

settings. Simply click adjust for best

performance, but reenable show

thumbnails instead of icons, show window

contents while dragging, and smooth

edges of screen fonts. This will keep

Windows 11 looking mostly the same, but

frees up some CPU and RAM cycles. Now

for the registry editor tweaks. And yes,

you are looking at 23.7% better 1% lows

just from these few tweaks. So do not

skip this part. To open up the registry

editor, press your Windows key, type in

regedit, and open it as an admin. Now,

because these are going to be some of

the most impactful settings we're going

to change in this video, it is crucial

that we export our registry. This way,

if you run into any issues or want to

try different values, all you would have

to do is use the registry file you just

created. So yeah, just click on file,

export, and boom, it's that easy. For

the first tweak, select this text up

here, replace it with this line from the

description, and press enter. If done

correctly, you will automatically get to

this folder. This is also how we're

going to get to every folder in the

section of the video. Then, double click

on scheduling category and change the

string value to high. And yes,

capitalization does matter. This will

also cause your computer to treat your

priority value as if it was set to two,

regardless of what you do to it. And

until Microsoft updates their

documentation from earlier this year on

July 14th, 2025, GPU priority and SFIO

priority values still do nothing. So,

you're fully optimized here. The second

regret tweak we're going to do is change

the wind32 priority separation value.

The number you set here controls how

Windows splits CPU resources between

foreground apps, your game for example,

and background tasks. Now, Windows tries

to keep things balanced by default, so

this tweak will make the CPU focus more

on the game. So, copy and paste this

line from the description into the

address bar and hit enter. Double click

win32 priority separation. There are

three things that you can change in

here. Depending on the number you put by

setting this to a value of 26, you're

going to get the best possible

responsiveness and boost the priority of

your foreground tasks. However, you

should definitely take the time to test

this one individually from any of the

other tweaks in this video. So, if

you're not getting the results you want

with 26, try some of these other values

which are widely considered to be good.

And remember, you have to restart your

PC every single time you change this

value. I promise you it's worth your

time, though. Now, let's optimize your

internet a little bit by disabling

network throttling. For some of you,

this may give you lower ping and more

consistent connection, but for others,

this might actually do the exact

opposite. I've never had issues with

this across any of my devices, but

regardless, this is a setting that you

should test individually from the others

because it could be problematic for some

of you. Anyways, copy and paste this

path from the description. If you don't

see a value called network throttling

index in this folder, don't worry. As

long as you are in the correct folder,

just right click on an empty space,

click new, and then dword 32-bit value

and name it network throttling index.

Capitalization is once again very

important. To disable it, double click

your newly created value and set it to

hexodimal FF FF FF FFF. That's 8 Fs. If

you find that this value sucks, then

sure, change it back to the default

hexodimal 8. And for the final registry

tweak, system responsiveness. This value

determines the percent of CPU resources

that are given to background tasks. So

set it to the lowest possible value of

10. If you try anything lower, Windows

treats it as if you typed in 20. So 10

is the best possible value here. And to

finish things up, we're just going to do

a few very simple BIOS tweaks. Starting

with enabling XMPP/DOCCP.

By default, your RAM may not run at the

speed you paid for and might run at a

much slower basic speed called a Jedec

profile. By enabling XMPP/DOCCP,

it'll run at the faster advertised

speed. And this can give you a huge FPS

boost, especially for your 1% lows. Just

check your RAM information online or in

the manual to make sure that it supports

this technology first. though. If it

does, go into the BIOS by simply

restarting your PC and spamming the

delete key or F2. Once you're in, the

option is often right on the main

screen, or you might find it in the AI

tweaker, overclocking, or extreme

tweaker tab. It will look slightly

different for everyone, but it might not

be an option for you if you're not on

the desktop. And some of you might

actually need a whole BIOS update just

for it to show up. But when you do find

it, simply change that setting to

enabled or profile one. The second thing

we're going to do in the BIOS is enable

or disable SMT/Hyperthreading

depending on how many CPU cores you

have. Simultaneous multi-threading or

hyperthreading basically lets each

individual core in your CPU execute two

threads at the same time. To access the

setting, you're going to have to go into

your BIOS's advanced mode. It's likely

somewhere in your advanced CPU settings,

but if you need help finding where it is

for your specific motherboard model,

Google is your best friend here. When

you find the SMT or hyperthreading

setting though, rule of thumb is to

enable it if you have less than eight

cores and disable it if you have eight

or more, but it does depend on the game.

So, definitely test it out for yourself.

And finally, we're going to enable above

4G decoding and resizable bar. If you

have a GPU with more than 4 GB of VRAM,

above 4G decoding allows your system to

basically use that VRAM significantly

more efficiently. And turning it on also

unlocks resizable bar, which not only

allows your CPU to have access to all of

your VRAMm at once instead of in 256 MGB

chunks. And together, these two can

increase your FPS by up to 70% for Intel

GPU users and up to 10% for everyone

else. Again, these are going to be in a

different spot depending on your

motherboard, but here are some common

locations. Basically, no reason to turn

either of these off, though. And just

before you quit the BIOS, make sure that

you save and exit. But that's enough

talking from me. Now, I want to hear

from you if these optimizations worked

for you and gave you a performance

boost. Let me know down below. And if

you ran into any issues, leave a comment

explaining exactly what went wrong and

what step it happened on so that the

community can help you out. But for now,

enjoy your newly optimized PC.

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