Most gamers buy a new GPU before they touch Windows. That's backwards.

1. Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling — on, then reboot. If it's off, your GPU is waiting on the CPU for work it should already have.

2. Game Mode + close Xbox Game Bar overlays. Game Bar looks harmless. It is not. It sits on the overlay path and costs frames in almost every title I've tested.

3. Power plan set to High Performance, and NVIDIA/AMD control panel set to Prefer Maximum Performance on the game profile. Windows' Balanced plan will downclock your CPU in loading screens and then fail to ramp back in time for the next fight.

Do these three before you touch in-game graphics. If your FPS barely moves, your bottleneck is the GPU — and that's a different checklist.

I put the full order of operations (Windows → GPU driver → in-game) in the FPS Boost Guide.