Smart players spend time tuning, tweaking, and pushing their systems' capabilities, reaping the benefits of a better gaming experience as a reward. The results are impressive, with games that look and perform better than their developers ever intended, and often the users didn't have to spend a dime.
To get a piece of this action, roll your hot rod into the software garage and give these half-dozen tools a close look to improve the speed, control, and capability of your system. Most are free, and one costs about the same as a drive-through lunch—and all of them give you more of a gaming edge.
Video card speed shop
Low frame rates can make or break a 3D game, and while 5 or 10 frames per second (fps) might not seem like a big difference, in action titles this performance delta can change a gaming session from fun to frustrating. Video cards depreciate faster than any other system component, and upgrades aren't always an easy answer. Assuming your rig can even handle the power draw the latest models require, good replacements run hundreds of dollars.But there's a cheaper way to squeeze performance out of your aging system: overclocking. When overclocked, most video cards push past their posted limits with ease and offer better gains than CPU boosts when it comes to gaming. Although many utilities to tweak graphics cards exist, three in particular are worth a closer look.
Nice touches include fan controls, a simple benchmark, and a burn-in stability test. OverDrive is also the quickest and easiest way to disable Cool and Quiet downclocking technology when you're looking for consistent performance or high-clock-speed stability. If you're running an AMD rig, this one-stop application is a must for system-tuning.
Platform-agnostic users have MSI's venerable Afterburner utility to tweak their card collection. MSI Afterburner is designed to work with MSI's own products, but in actuality it works with most modern hardware. The controls here are much simplified, dressed up with gray gradients and green glowing boxes for the sake of appearance, but the basics are well-represented. You'll find voltage, core, and shader clock controls, memory speeds, and fan settings, along with profile presets, startup options, and a videocard hardware monitor. You won't get the details provided by the other utilities here, but you won't find the more focused, no-nonsense approach Afterburner takes with those others either.
Controlling the controllers
No matter how fast your system is, you can't game properly without precise, reliable controllers. You'd think for developers this would be a given, considering how long PC gaming has been around, but that isn't the case. Due to crummy console ports, Flash limitations, Windows API changes, and more, it's easy to buy an expensive gamepad only to find it doesn't work with half your game library, despite being expressly designed for Windows. It's equally easy to come across a stunning indie game only to find a horrendous and unalterable keyboard control layout, dictated by programming or browser platform restrictions. What's a gamer to do?
The answer here is a program called Xpadder. Xpadder emulates a mouse and keyboard with the buttons and directional thumbpad of your game controller. It supports multiple profiles, rumble feedback, and chorded input, which allows for more commands than the number of buttons would normally permit. This technique can also be used to refine emulated mouse movement, with quick or precise modes for the analog directional stick switchable by toggling a preassigned button. Configuration screens are easy to decipher and present you with a visual representation of your gamepad for easy key assignment. You can also use it to control desktop software: For example, the video player of your Media Center PC can use your wireless controller like a remote. Xpadder isn't currently free, but it's well worth the $10 developer Jonathan Firth is asking. Older, free versions are still around if you'd like to give it a try before purchase.
Capability old and new
With speed and control taken care of, the last thing to tweak before you hit the road with your tuned rig is capability. Windows has been around a long time, and despite the many pains taken to ensure compatibility, things break on a regular basis. Older games run too quickly or not at all. Newer titles don't support all the advanced visual features on your shiny high-end graphics card. It can be a mess. Don't give up, though; you have options.
Now that we've tuned our hot rod, it's time to leave the garage and get our game on.
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