Whether you’re a gamer wanting to up your experience or simply want to reduce eyestrain whilst staring at spreadsheets, improving your PC’s visual capability can make a big difference. People can go pretty crazy modding their computers – sometimes spending hundreds on achieving the sharpest visual quality. However, unless you’re a pro gamer, there’s probably no need to go this overboard. Here are some tips for boosting your PCs visuals without spending a fortune.
Replace your graphics card
Gamers will often benefit most from a new graphics card. Some high-performance games may react slowly on a standard graphics card. Buying a more elite graphics card might increase your frames per second and give you a sharper quality overall. Many pro gamers will opt for the most premium cards available, sometimes even overclocking them – which is essentially modifying them to run faster. When playing online, every added bit of smoothness and sharpness matters when you’re competing for a pro position.
Buy a new monitor
A new graphics card won’t make any difference if your screen isn’t up to quality. HD monitors are no longer the pinnacle of visual quality. Serious PC users now opt for UHD (Ultra High Definition) monitors. Some of these have a horizontal resolution of 4000 pixels (known as 4k screens) with some even exceeding this.
On top of buying a higher resolution screen, many PC users are now buying multiple screens. This may give you a greater field of vision when gaming, or allow you to view a leaderboard or watch a video tutorial whilst gaming. For office work, it may allow you to view multiple pages without having to flick between tabs. Some people will even rotate monitors vertically and plate several of them to create one massive screen.
Don’t forget to buy the right cable
Make sure that you have the right kind of cable linking up to your graphics card. It can be worth doing a bit of research into DVI-I vs DVI-D as both have their different uses. Be wary of expensive branded cables as some of these are unlikely to make any difference other than being a little more durable.
Change your computer settings
It’s worth checking your software to see if you can improve your graphics and visual quality. It could be worth downloading the latest driver for your graphics card if you haven’t already. From there you can start tweaking individual settings. Some of this can be a matter of personal preference – for example turning off anti-aliasing may increase performance speed but prevent lines from being as smooth.
There may also be background processes on your PC that are slowing down your FPS. Turning off a few processes that aren’t necessary could be in order. You can download optimisation software that can handle these background processes for you, which may be useful for fine-tuning your PC to specific tasks if you’re not sure what to look for or simply don’t want to be constantly fiddling with settings.
