Symptom guide
It runs, but badly: stutter, heat, freezes and crashes
A game that starts and then performs poorly is describing a different problem depending on whether the picture is uniformly slow, intermittently jerky, or fine until it stops altogether. Those three are treated separately here, because a change that helps one frequently does nothing for another.
Quick answer
Decide first whether the problem is constant or intermittent. A constantly low frame rate is a capability question and responds to settings. Intermittent stutter in an otherwise smooth picture is almost never about settings — it is background activity, storage, or the network. A game that runs well and then closes without warning is a stability question and belongs in the crash section below, where settings changes are mostly a distraction.
Stutter and low frame rate are different complaints
People use both words for the same experience, but they point in opposite directions. A low frame rate is consistent: the picture moves less smoothly than it should, all the time, and it gets worse in busier scenes in a predictable way. Stutter is the opposite of consistent: the picture is fine and then hitches for a fraction of a second, usually while something new appears.
Consistent low frame rate means the machine is being asked for more than it can produce. Reducing what it is asked for helps, and the settings section below covers which reductions are worth making first. Intermittent stutter usually means something interrupted the game rather than outpaced it. The interruptions worth checking, roughly in order of how often they turn out to be responsible, are background downloads and updates, a storage device retrieving assets more slowly than the game expects, security software running a scheduled scan, and browser tabs or communication software with heavy activity of their own.
A useful test is to watch whether the hitch coincides with something happening on screen. Stutter that arrives every time a new area loads is a storage question. Stutter with no relationship to what is happening in the game is background activity.
Heat, and the specific problem with laptops
Sustained load produces heat, and every modern machine responds to heat by reducing performance to protect itself. The characteristic signature is a session that begins well and degrades over ten to thirty minutes, sometimes with fans becoming audible well before the picture suffers.
This affects laptops disproportionately, for reasons of physics rather than quality: there is less room for air to move. Three things make a measurable difference and none of them involve settings. Raising the machine so air can reach its underside is the first, because a laptop sitting flat on a soft surface is partly sealed. Clearing dust from the vents is the second. Checking the power profile is the third, and it is the one people miss — a machine on battery, or set to a quieter profile, may be deliberately holding back performance.
A note on what we are not going to tell you
You will find pages elsewhere quoting exact temperatures, frame rates and per-setting percentage gains. We do not publish figures like that, because we do not run a test lab and the numbers would be invented. Where a number genuinely matters, the hardware maker's own documentation for your specific component is the source worth reading.
Crashes that happen at a consistent moment
A crash that occurs at the same point every time is the most tractable kind, because it is repeatable and therefore testable. The same scene, the same menu, or the same action each time points at the game's own files or at a specific piece of content that was not downloaded correctly.
Where the game was installed through a distribution platform, its file verification tool compares what is on disk against what should be there and replaces anything that does not match. Where it came from a publisher's own launcher, the equivalent repair function usually sits in the launcher's settings. Either one resolves this class of problem far faster than reinstalling, and neither requires re-downloading the whole game.
Crashes that happen at random
Randomly timed crashes are harder, because there is nothing to reproduce. The causes divide into three groups.
- Memory pressure
- A machine that runs out of working memory does not always say so. It swaps to storage, becomes slow, and eventually something is closed to make room — sometimes the game. Games in this category are frequently left running alongside a browser with many tabs, which is where the pressure often comes from.
- Overlays and injected software
- Anything that draws on top of the game — capture tools, chat overlays, performance monitors, screen recorders — attaches itself to the same display path the game uses. When the game updates and the overlay has not, the result is instability that appears unrelated to either. Closing that software entirely is a clean test.
- Drivers and power
- A graphics driver that is much older or much newer than the game expects can produce crashes with no pattern. So can a power supply under strain in a desktop machine, which typically shows up as the whole system restarting rather than the game closing.
Settings worth changing, and the order to change them in
Where the problem is genuinely a capability one, changing settings helps — but changing all of them at once tells you nothing. Change one, observe, and keep the change only if it helped.
| Setting | What it governs | Usually worth trying |
|---|---|---|
| Resolution | The number of pixels drawn for every frame | First, because the relationship to workload is direct and large |
| Shadows and lighting | Extra passes over the scene before it is displayed | Early, since the visual cost of reducing them is often modest |
| Anti-aliasing | Smoothing of edges, at additional cost per frame | Early, and often barely noticeable at higher resolutions |
| Texture detail | How much graphics memory the scene occupies | Where stutter rather than low frame rate is the symptom |
| Frame rate cap | An upper limit on frames produced per second | For heat and fan noise, and for steadier pacing on laptops |
A capped frame rate deserves a specific mention, because it is counter-intuitive. Allowing a machine to produce as many frames as it can means it works as hard as it can, generates as much heat as it can, and then reduces performance to cope. A cap set at a level the machine can hold comfortably often produces a steadier experience than an uncapped one that swings.
When the machine is not the problem
Some poor performance is not local at all. A game whose characters move in bursts, or whose actions register late while the picture itself stays smooth, is describing a network problem rather than a rendering one, and belongs on our connection and latency page. A game that performs badly for everyone at once, immediately after an update, is a question for the publisher.
Optimisers, boosters and cleaners
Tools promising to raise performance by cleaning, boosting or optimising are a standing feature of search results on this topic, and installing an unknown utility with broad access to a machine in order to solve a graphics problem is a poor trade. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes guidance for individuals on securing devices and choosing software, and is a better starting point than a download page found alongside the symptom you searched for.
Recording what you find
If the problem survives all of this, the record you have built is what makes the next conversation productive.
- Whether the problem is constant, intermittent, or a crash, in those terms.
- Whether it is reproducible, and if so exactly what reproduces it.
- What you changed, one item at a time, and what each change did.
- Whether anything else on the machine changed shortly before it started.
That list answers most of the first questions any support channel will ask, and occasionally it identifies the cause before you send it.