Find the bottleneck

If everything we've discussed so far still doesn't get you close to the frame rates you need, your system may have a bottleneck that's holding everything else up. Is your system RAM up to the task, for instance?

When equipped with only 2GB of generic DDR2 DIMMs, our test PC barely reached 20fps on the Crysis demo (1,600 x 1,200, high quality). We replaced these with 4GB of Crucial's finest Ballistix offerings and frame rates went up by almost 25 per cent – not bad for an £80 to £90 outlay.

And that's just the start – faster and more reliable RAM means you'll probably be able to overclock your CPU further, too. A RAM upgrade didn't offer the same benefits if we tried to run Crysis at the very highest-quality levels, though: the 2GB test returned 11.75fps, the 4GB a near-identical 11.915fps.

That's because the graphics card is now the bottleneck. It simply couldn't deliver acceptable performance at the settings we'd chosen.

As a last resort, then, you can always change your game settings. There's usually an intimidating list of quality-related options, but tweaking just one or two of these will often be enough.

In Crysis, for instance, just changing the Shading Quality setting from 'Very High' to 'Medium' was enough to see our test PC's 1,600 x 1,200 frame rate leap from 11.915fps to 23.61fps.

Although Crysis will by default use DirectX 10 when installed on Windows Vista and 7, switching to DirectX 9 gave us a further big performance jump to a new frame rate of 35.49fps. There's no guarantee that other games with a similar option will see such a huge improvement, but it's worth a try.

We finished by applying some of the techniques we mentioned earlier. Disabling PC resource hogs increased the frame rate by four per cent; turning off pointless services gave us a three per cent increase; using Process Lasso added more than five per cent; and overclocking returned an extra 14 per cent.

They're small gains, but every little really does help, and the incremental effect meant that a previously unplayable game was now purring along at more than 45fps. That's close to a 400 per cent improvement – a real result

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