Boost Your Battlefield 3 Framerate

If you are playing the PC version of Battlefield 3, which you should be doing because it is the best by far, you will have probably realized by now that this game is quite a system hog. Unless you have big bucks to afford the latest and greatest gaming system (dual GTX 590s anybody?) or you are an expert overclocker and have wrung every nanoparticle of power out of your system already then you will probably want to know how to boost your Battlefield 3 framerate.

Today I am going to walk you through a few simple steps you can use to speed up your computer for Battlefield 3 and help you get the best gaming experience possible:

1. Update your video card drivers to the latest possible. Visit either the AMD/ATi or the nVidia website, depending on your card, in order to get the best drivers. Even laptop gamers will benefit from updated drivers.
2. Update your motherboard firmware/BIOS. This is a bit more tricky, but find out your motherboard model using a program such as CPU-Z, and then check online to see if there are any firmware or BIOS updates available. Remember to create a system restore point before you do this.
3. Defragment your hard drive. Although the usefulness of doing this has diminished somewhat with newer Microsoft operating systems, you should still defragment regularly for optimal computing performance.
4. Turn off anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Unless you have a high end VGA card these two options will eat up a lot of GPU power. You will notice the increase in performance more than you notice the decrease in graphics quality.
5. Use a wired Internet connection. For hardcore gaming you should be playing with a hardwired Internet connection. If this is not possible and you must use wireless then make sure your wireless drivers are up to date, and try moving as close as possible to your wireless router.
6. Overlock. Visit Overclock.net if you are an overclocking newb and learn how to squeeze every last bit of performance possible out of your hardware. Overclocking a graphics card is easier than O/Cing your processor- you just keep upping the clock speed on your GPU until you see 'artifacts' (these are little graphical distortions) then roll back the clock speed 5-10 mhz and enjoy increased performance. Mid range cards that run cool benefit the most from overclocking. On the other hand, overclocking your CPU is harder, as there is greater risk of permanently damaging your processor. Remember that you need to keep your PC well-ventilated in order to overclock. I really do recommend that you give overclocking a go, as you can extend the 'life span' of your hardware in terms of performance quite dramatically. Get Tweakboy's Ultimate Overclocking Handbook, and you will learn how to maximize your overclocking results and avoid damaging your PC. Using Tweakboy's guide you should easily see about a 15-25% increase in BF3 performance.
7. Clean your registry out. If you have been installing and uninstalling programs and applications regularly on your Windows computer then your registry may well be quite clogged up with 'junk'- it is dangerous to go delete this manually, but cleaning the registry can yield impressive performance boosts. Try this free tool called 'Registry Fix' - it is effective and will clean up your registry safely and thus boost your Battlefield 3 Framerate.