A round of player discussions on boosting frame rates for low-end PCs shows that standard steps like closing common software, disabling system components, changing power plans, or even reinstalling Windows may not resolve the actual performance bottlenecks, and some actions might even have counterproductive effects.
One player reported that while running Light & Shadow: Expedition 33 on a Core i7-4770K, one core remained idle, and the issue was only resolved after reinstalling the previously removed Xbox Game Bar. Another player experienced persistent stuttering while playing Elden Ring with an RTX 4070 Super, eventually tracing the problem to NVIDIA's application repeatedly running automatic tuning tests.
Hardware settings can also become a bottleneck. One player discovered that their DDR4-3200 RAM had been running in single-channel mode at 2100MHz for three years; only after enabling XMP in the BIOS did World of Warcraft consistently reach 60 FPS.
Some frame-boosting tools also have specific conditions for use. The extreme performance mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim significantly sacrifices geometric detail and texture quality; OptiFine for Minecraft increased frame rates from 20–30 FPS to around 50 FPS in certain cases. Lossless Scaling is better suited for situations where the base frame rate is already acceptable. As for performance improvement figures on Linux, Bazzite, and SteamOS, these currently come from individual player cases and should not be considered universal test results.