What Is FreeSync, And Should You Enable It On Your Monitor?

Many PC gamers fall into two camps: those who run the game, choose a graphics preset, and have fun, and those who fine-tune various settings until they get the smoothest experience possible. The first type can overlook a few stutters here and there, even on a budget, but the second will go to great lengths to get more out of their graphics card. Fortunately, there is a feature you can enable on your monitor to iron out a few kinks — AMD's FreeSync. Does FreeSync improve FPS?

In short, if your monitor supports this (chances are it does, as even heavily discounted monitors do), it's better to turn FreeSync on, as it'll make your game smoother. Granted, the feature provides only a marginal improvement in terms of FPS (about one to two extra FPS on average), but that's not the sole point of enabling it. FreeSync synchronizes your graphics card frame rate to the monitor's refresh rate, thereby eliminating stuttering and screen tearing. The end result is smooth gameplay with minimal annoying visual artifacts.

You've really got nothing to lose by trying it. So open your monitor's function menu (with the physical buttons) and find AMD FreeSync. All that's left to do is download the latest graphics drivers and enable FreeSync in Radeon Settings. What if you're running Nvidia? In that case, Nvidia graphics cards have tech called G-Sync, which functions in basically the same way.

So, a game keeps struggling and taking you out of the experience. Before going down the rabbit hole, think about a few settings you can tweak in-game. This will be a bit of a balancing act between visual pop and technical performance, and you must decide how much you want to degrade the graphics. Either way, the non-negotiable should be VSync. If you've got adaptive sync like FreeSync on, you don't need this dinosaur technology, so you should give it the boot. Same with motion blur, which gamers grew to hate, and extra effects like film grain and depth of field (things most won't really miss). In terms of heavy downgrades, always try to decrease shadows, as rendering them can be a resource hog.

If you're still not satisfied, try to decrease the overall load on your PC by closing any background processes in the Task Manager, and make sure that your graphics drivers are up to date. You should even pop the case open and check if the interiors of your machine are caked with dust. This can absolutely push the temperatures of your CPU and GPU through the roof. Since a clean case improves airflow, this is bound to give the machine some relief and allow it to spit out a few FPS.

Lastly, save from overclocking, enable AI resolution upscaling and any of the available frame generation settings. Sure, pushing these to the extremes won't make an ancient PC run Cyberpunk 2077 perfectly, but it'll give you better performance at the cost of some extra input lag and jittery textures. Don't use this one as a crutch, though. Enabling FreeSync, bumping down graphics settings, and other tips should serve as a way to improve the baseline, and the AI settings are there solely to round things out and make the game run even better.