Hardware & advanced guides

The wins software can’t safely make for you.

FrameForge does everything a program safely can to Windows. It stops at the edge of the firmware. The biggest free FPS gain on most rigs — running your RAM at its rated speed — lives in BIOS, where no optimizer should be reaching. So does updating a GPU driver, and so does an overclock. These guides cover that other half, with the same honesty: what helps, what is marginal, and what can bite you.

Start with the scan

The Pro tier’s Diagnostics scan reads your rig and points at exactly which of these apply to you — whether your RAM is below its rated speed, how old your GPU driver is, whether your monitor is running below its max refresh rate. Run it first, then come back to the guide it sent you to.

Six guides

Read by what you want to change.

The first two are zero-risk reading. The overclock and controller pages carry real risk and say so up front. Everything here is based on the optimizer’s own built-in advice, written against a reference rig: a Ryzen 5 4500, a Radeon RX 580, and 16 GB of RAM.

Read first · no risk

Reading the diagnostics scan

Every line the scan prints, what it means, and the exact tweak or setting that fixes it. RAM speed, driver age, refresh rate, power plan, TRIM, MSI mode, Core Isolation.

Open guide

BIOS · the big free win

BIOS & RAM checklist

Enable DOCP/EXPO and set RAM to its rated speed — usually the single biggest free FPS gain. Plus Resizable BAR, CSM off, the AGESA update, the fTPM stutter fix, and fan curves.

Open guide

Overclock · at your own risk

RX 580 GPU overclock

Power limit, core clock, and the Polaris memory quirk where pushing too far drops FPS without ever crashing. Step by step in Afterburner, tested against a benchmark each time.

Open guide

CPU · modest headroom

Ryzen 5 4500 PBO

Precision Boost Overdrive and Curve Optimizer, honestly. The 4500 doesn't have much room — a light PBO plus a decent cooler beats a risky fixed all-core overclock most of the time.

Open guide

In-game · competitive

Fortnite settings

FrameForge already writes a low-latency config when it detects Fortnite. Here is what to set by hand on top of it — render mode, Vsync, motion blur, the FPS cap, and the view-distance debate.

Open guide

Controller · advanced

Controller polling rate

Raising a wired controller's USB polling to 500–1000 Hz with Hidusbf. Unsigned driver, real USB-stability risk, fully optional. For a mouse, use the maker's software instead.

Open guide

Why software stops here

A registry edit is reversible and contained. A wrong BIOS setting can stop a machine from posting, and a bad overclock can crash or, over time, degrade hardware. None of that should be automated by a tool you double-clicked. FrameForge tells you what to change and points you here; you make the firmware and hardware calls, with both hands on the wheel. Read the risk notes. Change one thing at a time. Keep a way back.