The $0 PC Upgrade: 10 Free Ways to Boost FPS in 2026

With RAM, GPUs and SSDs all priced like jewellery this year, the smartest upgrade is the one that costs nothing. This guide ranks ten genuinely free performance boosts by real-world value — turning on your RAM's rated speed, using DLSS/FSR properly, fixing the two settings that murder frame rates — plus the order to do them in and the popular "optimisations" that are a waste of your time.

Normally, the answer to "my games run like rubbish" is "buy more RAM or a better GPU." In 2026, that advice is basically a joke — RAM prices have gone vertical and even building a PC now costs more than buying one. So this is the other playbook: everything you can do for free, ranked honestly by how much it's worth, because most guides list twenty tweaks and never tell you which three actually matter. Total time if you do the lot: about twenty minutes.

First, the cheat sheet: what each trick is worth

Here's the whole article in one table, ranked roughly by payoff. Exact gains depend on your hardware and the game — treat these as honest ballparks, not promises.

*Frame generation raises displayed frames, not rendered ones — great for smoothness, but it can add a touch of input lag, so competitive shooter players may prefer it off. More on that below.

1. Turn on upscaling — the single biggest free win

If you do one thing from this list, make it this. DLSS (NVIDIA), FSR (AMD, works on nearly any GPU) and XeSS (Intel) render the game at a lower resolution internally, then rebuild the image to look near-native. The payoff is huge: switching from native to a Quality upscaling preset typically adds 30–50% more frames, and in some games far more — think going from the mid-60s to over 100fps on the same graphics card.

Find it in the game's video settings under "upscaling" or "super resolution," and start on the Quality preset — it's the sweet spot where the image still looks sharp. If you need more frames, step down to Balanced or Performance. One tip: upscaling works best going up to high resolutions (1440p or 4K), where it has more detail to work with. And if your card doesn't support DLSS, don't sulk — FSR runs on basically everything, including old NVIDIA cards and even some integrated graphics.

2. Ray tracing: the setting quietly eating half your frames

Ray tracing looks lovely and costs a fortune — turning it on can chop 30–50% (or more) off your frame rate, especially in games built around it. If your PC is struggling, this is the first setting to sacrifice. Be honest with yourself: mid-firefight, are you really admiring the puddle reflections? Turn it off, enjoy the massive FPS refund, and if you truly want it, pair it with upscaling to claw back the cost.

3. Your RAM is probably running slow on purpose (fix: XMP/EXPO)

Here's the one that shocks people: the fast RAM you paid for almost certainly isn't running at its rated speed. Out of the box, memory defaults to a conservative standard speed — often 4800MHz for DDR5 kits rated for 6000 — until you flick one switch in the BIOS called XMP (Intel) or EXPO (AMD).

Restart, tap Delete or F2 during boot, find XMP/EXPO, set it to Profile 1, save and exit. Two minutes, and in CPU-heavy games it's typically worth an extra 5–15 FPS. Given what RAM costs to replace right now, running what you own at full speed is the closest thing to free money in PC gaming.

4. The settings triage: shadows and reflections first

Not all graphics settings cost the same. Shadows and reflections are consistently the two biggest frame-eaters for the smallest visual difference — dropping them from Ultra to Medium often buys around 15–20% more FPS while looking nearly identical in motion. Textures, on the other hand, are usually close to free if you have the video memory, so leave those high. That's the whole art of settings triage: pay for what you notice, cut what you don't.

5. Frame generation — great, with one honest caveat

Frame generation (part of DLSS, FSR and XeSS in 2026, and even a cheap third-party app called Lossless Scaling that works in almost anything) inserts AI-generated frames between real ones. The motion looks dramatically smoother — but your inputs are still tied to the real frames underneath, so it can feel slightly less responsive. The practical rule: brilliant for single-player games, skip it in competitive shooters. It also works best when your base frame rate is already decent (60-ish), so use it to turn good into great, not unplayable into playable.

6–8. The boring housekeeping that's actually worth doing

Drivers: GPU drivers regularly ship real, per-game performance improvements — big releases often land alongside a driver tuned for them. Grab updates through the NVIDIA or AMD app. Free frames a few times a year.

Background apps: every Chrome tab, launcher and overlay is stealing CPU cycles and RAM from your game — and if you're squeezed on memory (aren't we all this year), this matters double. Ctrl+Shift+Esc, sort by memory, close the junk, and disable auto-start apps you don't need. Fewer random stutters, snappier alt-tabs.

Windows toggles: make sure Game Mode is on (Settings › Gaming), and try Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling (Settings › System › Display › Graphics). Both are small wins, but they're free and take a minute.

9. Heat is a silent FPS killer

If your games start fine and get worse the longer you play, that's usually thermal throttling — your CPU or GPU hitting its temperature limit and deliberately slowing down. The free fix is embarrassingly physical: unplug the PC, take it outside, and blast the dust out of the fans and heatsinks with compressed air (a laptop's vents too). Give the case some breathing room instead of jamming it against a wall. A free monitoring tool like HWiNFO will show your temps; if a five-year-old desktop CPU is still cooking after a clean, a $15 tube of thermal paste is the one near-free exception to this article's $0 rule.

10. The two-minute dual-channel check

If your PC has two RAM sticks, they need to be in the right slots (usually slots 2 and 4 — check the motherboard manual) to run in dual-channel mode. Get it wrong and you silently lose up to 10–20% of gaming performance. Check for free: open Task Manager › Performance › Memory and look for "channels: 2" (or use CPU-Z's Memory tab). If it says single and you own two sticks, moving one stick over is the fastest hardware "upgrade" you'll ever do.

The stuff to skip: snake oil corner

Now the part most sites won't write because these things sell ads: a lot of popular "optimisation" advice does nothing, and some of it is actively harmful.

• Registry cleaners and "PC booster" apps: no measurable FPS benefit, frequent bundled junk, occasional broken Windows. Hard skip.

• "RAM optimiser" tools: Windows already manages memory well; these mostly just flush caches and make things slower for a while.

• Random YouTube regedit tweaks and "debloat" scripts: the good ones save you a few background processes; the bad ones break Windows Update. Not worth the roulette when everything above is safer and bigger.

• Paid "FPS booster" subscriptions: everything they legitimately do is a free toggle listed on this page.

The pattern: if a tweak's benefit can't be seen in an actual frame-time graph, it's a placebo. Speaking of which —

Measure it, or it didn't happen

Before and after any change, get a number. Steam has a built-in FPS counter (Settings › In-Game), NVIDIA's overlay is Alt+R, and the gold standard is the free MSI Afterburner + RivaTuner combo, which shows frame times — the spikes that feel like lag even when average FPS looks fine. Two useful diagnostics while you're there: if your GPU sits well under ~90% usage while the game stutters, your CPU is the bottleneck (upscaling won't help much; background-app cleanup and XMP will). And if a new game stutters only in its first hour, that's shader compilation — it genuinely fixes itself as you play.

Do them in this order

Twenty minutes, biggest wins first: enable XMP/EXPO in the BIOS (2 min) → update your GPU driver (5) → in your most-played game, turn on Quality upscaling, kill ray tracing, drop shadows and reflections one notch (3) → toggle Game Mode and HAGS (1) → clear autostart junk (3) → check dual channel (2) → dust the fans (whenever). Stack the lot and struggling systems routinely pick up 50% or more in demanding games — for exactly nothing, which in 2026 is the best price going. The parts shortage will end eventually; until then, this is how you wait it out in style.

Frequently asked questions

How can I increase FPS without upgrading my PC?

The biggest free wins, in order: enable DLSS/FSR/XeSS upscaling (+30–50%), turn off ray tracing, enable your RAM's XMP/EXPO profile in the BIOS, and drop shadows and reflections to Medium. Together they can add 50% or more in demanding games at zero cost.

Does enabling XMP really increase FPS?

Yes — RAM ships running below its rated speed by default, and enabling XMP (Intel) or EXPO (AMD) in the BIOS unlocks the speed you paid for. It's typically worth 5–15 FPS in CPU-bound games and takes about two minutes.

Is DLSS or FSR better?

If your GPU supports DLSS (NVIDIA RTX cards), use it — image quality is generally the best of the bunch. FSR's big advantage is that it runs on almost any GPU, including older cards, and its recent versions have closed most of the quality gap. Use whichever your game and card support.

Does frame generation add input lag?

A little, yes. Generated frames don't carry new input data, so responsiveness follows your real frame rate, not the displayed one. It's great for smoothness in single-player games; competitive players usually leave it off.

Do PC booster and registry cleaner apps actually work?

No. They produce no measurable FPS gains, and some bundle junk or break things. Every legitimate optimisation they perform is a free built-in setting — the ones covered in this guide.

Why does my FPS drop after playing for a while?

That pattern is classic thermal throttling — your CPU or GPU is overheating and slowing itself down. Clean the dust from fans and vents, improve case airflow, and check temperatures with a free tool like HWiNFO.