ForgeTax Windows 11 Optimization Guide: Ultimate PC Tuning for Maximum FPS

I’ve lost count of the rounds I’ve died to a stutter that had nothing to do with my aim. You know the feeling: the peek is perfect, the crosshair is on the head, and the game hitches for a split second while Windows decides it’s the perfect moment to do something ‘important’ in the background. Fresh out of the box, Windows 11 is a great OS, but it ships with telemetry, background services and power settings built for office laptops, not for a rig you bought to push frames.

This guide is the ForgeTax tuning routine, shaped by the community around GraveYardDev. It’s a checklist of tweaks that cut background noise, tighten memory behavior and keep your hardware awake when it counts. I’ve kept every step from the original routine, added my own notes on where each tweak shines, and flagged the spots where I’d stay careful. Grab a coffee, open a few windows, and let’s get your machine in shape.

ForgeTax Stuttering & Low FPS Fix Ultimate Performance Optimization Guide

Step Zero: Build Your Safety Net

Before you touch services, power plans or anything that smells like system internals, make a restore point. Takes two minutes, saves you an evening of reinstalling.

1. Hit the Windows key, type Create a restore point, and press Enter.
2. On the System Protection tab, pick your system drive (usually C:) and click Configure.
3. Make sure Turn on system protection is selected. Slide the max usage to roughly 5% to 10% so there’s room for decent snapshots. Apply, then OK.
4. Click Create…, name it ForgeTax Before Optimization, and wait for the confirmation dialog.

If a tweak makes your system act weird later, you roll back and move on with your life. Skipping this step is how people end up posting ‘help, my PC won’t boot’ threads at 2 AM.

Core Gaming Settings: Game Mode, HAGS and Per-Game GPU Priority

Windows 11 has a few gaming features baked in. Some help, some add overhead. Here’s the setup I’d run.

Game Mode tells Windows to favor your game, which means no random driver installs or notification popups mid-match.

• Open Settings (Win + I), go to Gaming, then Game Mode, and flip it ON.
• Open the Graphics section, then Default graphics settings, and turn on Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling (HAGS). This moves frame scheduling work off the CPU and onto the GPU’s own scheduler, which takes pressure off the CPU on modern graphics hardware. On some setups the gain is small, and on a few older drivers it can cause oddities, so test it in your own games.
• Back in the main Graphics menu, click Browse, add the .exe of your competitive titles, then select each game, hit Options, choose High performance, and Save.

That last step is underrated. Telling Windows which GPU and power profile a game should use stops weird fallbacks, especially on laptops with hybrid graphics.

Kill Fullscreen Optimizations and Overlays

Here’s one that bites competitive players. Windows’ Desktop Window Manager can quietly run your ‘fullscreen’ game in a hybrid borderless state. It looks fine, but it can add input buffering and that mushy feeling on mouse movement.

1. Go to the game’s install folder and find the main launch executable.
2. Right-click it, open Properties, then the Compatibility tab.
3. Tick Disable fullscreen optimizations.
4. Click Change high DPI settings, check High DPI scaling override, and set the dropdown to Application. Click OK, then Apply.
5. Kill your overlays. In Discord: User Settings → App Settings → Game Overlay, then turn off Enable in-game overlay. Do the same in Steam and in any peripheral software like Razer Synapse or Logitech G Hub.

Overlays are small programs injecting themselves into your game’s render pipeline. Handy for chat, useless when you’re chasing a clean frame time.

Power Plan: Unlock Ultimate Performance

The default Balanced plan lets your CPU hop between power states constantly. That’s fine for browsing. For gaming, it means tiny latency spikes whenever the processor has to wake up for a sudden load.

1. Right-click the Start button and open Terminal (Admin) or Command Prompt (Admin).
2. Paste this command and press Enter:

powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61

3. Close the terminal and open the classic Control Panel.
4. Go to Hardware and Sound → Power Options.
5. Expand Show additional plans and select the new Ultimate Performance plan.
6. Click Change plan settings → Change advanced power settings → Processor power management. Set both Minimum and Maximum Processor State to 100%, on battery and plugged in.

With this setup, your CPU clocks stay high through slow moments instead of dropping and then scrambling. Heads up for laptop owners: this will chew through battery and push temps up. On a desktop with decent cooling, it’s a non-issue. On a thin laptop, only use it while plugged in and keep an eye on thermals.

Memory Management: Turning Off RAM Compression

Windows 11 uses memory compression to squeeze inactive RAM pages. On machines with under 8 GB, it earns its keep. On a gaming rig with plenty of RAM, the CPU spends cycles compressing and decompressing data, which can show up as micro-stutters while a game streams assets.

1. Open an admin Command Prompt or PowerShell.
2. Check the current state with Get-MMAgent.
3. Look at the MemoryCompression line. If it says True, run Disable-MMAgent -mc.
4. A successful run returns quietly to the next prompt. Restart later so the change takes effect.

My take: this one is worth it if you have 16 GB or more. If you’re on 8 GB and running a browser, Discord and a game together, leave compression on, or you may swap to disk more often and make things worse.

Debloating: Startup Apps and Services

Every background process eats a slice of your CPU and memory. Trimming them out means more resources for the game in front of you.

Startup Apps

• Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager and go to the Startup apps tab.
• Right-click anything non-essential and choose Disable. Edge, Cortana (if it’s still lingering on your build), Spotify, OneDrive and launcher updaters are the usual suspects.

Services

• Press Win + R, type services.msc, and hit Enter.
• Find Connected User Experiences and Telemetry. Right-click, open Properties, set Startup type to Disabled, and click Stop if it’s running.
• Find SysMain (the old Superfetch). It preloads apps into memory based on your usage habits. Great for office work, but it can fight with other memory tweaks during long gaming sessions. Set it to Disabled, click Stop, then Apply and OK.

Don’t go on a service-disabling spree beyond these. Randomly killing services is how you break Windows Update, Bluetooth or the Microsoft Store without understanding why.

Storage Tweaks for SSDs and NVMe Drives

Solid state drives need a couple of features on to hold their top speeds.

1. Open Settings, go to System → Storage → Advanced storage settings → Disks & volumes.
2. Select your OS or gaming NVMe/SSD and open Properties.
3. Under the policies options, make sure Write caching on the device is turned on.
4. Back in the main Storage menu, open Storage Sense and switch it OFF. You don’t want Windows launching cleanup sweeps while you’re mid-match. Run the classic Disk Cleanup manually now and then instead.

Quick Reference: What Each Tweak Does

Final Check: Reboot, Measure, Maintain

Finish with a full cold reboot, then open Task Manager’s Performance tab and watch your idle process count, thread allocation and memory footprint. You should see lower resting RAM usage and fewer background tasks than before. If numbers look the same, run a benchmark or play the same replay or map before and after, because you want proof, not vibes.

For long-term upkeep, do a clean graphics driver install with Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) every few driver releases. Leftover driver junk is a sneaky cause of weird crashes and uneven frame times.

Final Verdict

Is this guide going to double your FPS? No, and anyone promising that is selling something. What it does is remove friction: fewer background tasks, steadier CPU behavior, cleaner input and fewer random hitches. For competitive shooters and anything where frame pacing matters, that’s the kind of improvement you feel in your hands before you see it on a counter. Do the restore point first, apply the tweaks in order, test your games after each big change, and keep what helps. Your rig, your rules.