You bought a gaming laptop with a decent RTX in it and the frame rates look nothing like the reviews. Before assuming you were sold a dud: in most cases it isn’t broken, it’s throttled — and a good share of those limits come off in five minutes without spending anything.

This guide runs in order of impact. The first three points are free and explain the vast majority of cases. The last one is the part that has no fix, and it’s worth knowing before you keep searching.

1. Plug it in. Seriously.

It’s the number one cause and it sounds too obvious, so let’s get it out of the way first.

On battery, practically every gaming laptop aggressively limits the processor and the graphics card. It isn’t a fault: a battery can’t deliver the wattage a dedicated GPU wants at full tilt, and the manufacturer would rather cut performance than shut down. The drop isn’t subtle — it can be half your frame rate or worse.

Two details people find out late:

• A 100% battery isn’t enough. Many models only unlock full performance with the charger connected, even with the battery full.
• It has to be the right charger. Charging over USB-C with a 65 W adapter on a laptop that ships with a 200 W brick works fine for office use, but it can’t supply enough to game: the machine will pull from the battery anyway and you’re back to the same problem.

2. The performance mode, which ships turned off

This is the biggest free win, and it’s hidden inside a program plenty of people uninstall assuming it’s bloatware.

Almost every manufacturer ships its own utility — Armoury Crate on ASUS, Legion Space on Lenovo, MSI Center, Omen Gaming Hub on HP — and inside it there’s a profile selector that usually sits on “balanced” or “silent”. That profile puts a wattage ceiling on the graphics card and caps the fan curve.

Switching it to performance (or “turbo”, depending on the brand) raises the available TGP and lets the fans do their job. The gap between silent and performance on the same machine is one of the largest you’ll see, and it costs nothing.

With the obvious toll: it will get considerably louder. That’s the real trade in this category, and there’s no way around it — the heat has to leave somehow.

And in Windows, check the power plan is set to Best performance while you game.

3. The MUX switch: your screen might be costing you FPS

Almost nobody explains this one, and it’s among the most surprising when you turn it on.

Many gaming laptops don’t wire the display to the dedicated GPU at all, but to the processor’s integrated graphics. The dedicated card renders the game and then hands the image to the integrated one, which draws it on the panel. That detour exists to save battery, and it costs frames: in practice a single-digit percentage or a bit more, depending on the game.

The fix is the MUX switch: a toggle that wires the panel straight to the dedicated GPU. It’s in the same manufacturer utility, usually as “discrete GPU mode”, “Ultimate” or similar. It normally needs a reboot.

Three things worth knowing:

• Not every laptop has one. It’s a feature cut from cheaper models. If you can’t find it, you aren’t looking wrong.
• Battery life drops. With the dedicated GPU always active, runtime outside games falls noticeably. Plenty of people switch it on only to play.
• Models with Advanced Optimus do the switching themselves, no reboot. If yours has it, there’s nothing to change.

A shortcut that works just as well: if you game on an external monitor, on many models the HDMI output is wired directly to the dedicated GPU. Plugging the monitor in can hand you those frames without touching any setting.

4. Thermal throttling: what’s normal and what isn’t

This is where expectations need adjusting, because a laptop’s bar isn’t a tower’s.

A gaming laptop under load runs hot by design: seeing the processor between 85 and 95 °C while gaming is normal, not a failure. Next to the 60-80 °C we give as the reference for a desktop CPU in the cooling guide, that looks alarming — but these are two-centimetre chassis with heatsinks the size of a credit card.

What does signal a problem is something else: clocks collapsing and staying down. A temperature spike followed by a brief dip in frequency is normal operation. Starting a session at 60 FPS and sitting at 40 ten minutes later, consistently, is sustained throttling.

How to see it instead of guessing: run HWiNFO64 in the background while you play, watching CPU and GPU clock speeds alongside temperature. If temperature plants itself at a ceiling and the clocks drop at the same moment, there’s your answer.

5. What you can fix with your hands

Three physical things, from least to most effort.

Lift it up. Almost all of them take air in from underneath. On a desk it has a few millimetres; on a bed or a sofa, it blocks the intakes completely. Any stand that tilts it a couple of centimetres genuinely helps, and a simple riser does the job.

Clean it. Laptop fans build up dust on the exhaust grilles, and after two years it can be a mat that chokes the airflow. Compressed air from outside gains a lot; hold the blades still with a finger or a toothpick while you blow, because spinning them at high speed can damage the motor.

And repasting, which pays off most on three or four-year-old machines — with two warnings: it usually voids the warranty, and on a laptop it means disassembling far more than on a tower. If the machine is still under warranty, this isn’t the time.

6. What you won’t fix

And this is the part that stops you hunting for a solution that doesn’t exist.

Your laptop GPU performs below the desktop card with the same name. Mobile chips have fewer cores or less bandwidth to fit the chassis power budget. As a rough rule, a laptop GPU plays closer to the desktop card one tier below it. We go into it in the gaming laptop guide, and if your expectations came from comparing with a tower, that’s where the gap is — not in your machine.

The TGP was set by the manufacturer. Two laptops with the same RTX can carry very different wattage ceilings depending on the chassis, and yours doesn’t go up. Performance mode gives you everything that ceiling allows; past that, no setting helps.

And the panel’s resolution counts. If your screen is 1440p, your GPU is pushing nearly twice the pixels of 1080p. Lowering render resolution or turning on upscaling (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) is far more reasonable on a laptop than on a tower.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my gaming laptop slower on battery? Because the battery can’t deliver the wattage the processor and graphics card need at full performance, so the machine limits them. The drop can be half your FPS or more. Always play plugged in, with its original charger.

Is it normal for my laptop to hit 90 °C while gaming? Yes. Between 85 and 95 °C under load is standard for a gaming laptop, well above what’s normal in a tower. The worry isn’t the peak temperature, it’s clocks dropping and staying down.

What is a MUX switch and what does it do? It’s a toggle that wires the display straight to the dedicated GPU instead of routing through the integrated graphics. Turning it on raises FPS at the cost of battery life. It lives in the manufacturer’s utility, and not every model has one.

Do cooling pads actually work? They help mostly because they lift the machine and clear the intakes underneath. That’s the bulk of the effect; the extra fans contribute far less than the box promises.

Can I raise my graphics card’s TGP? No. The wattage ceiling is set by the manufacturer based on the chassis and its cooling. Performance mode gives you everything that ceiling allows, and that’s the end of the margin.

Is repasting worth it? On three or four-year-old machines, it’s what lowers temperatures most. But it usually voids the warranty, and taking a laptop apart is more delicate than a tower. Under warranty, no.

Bottom line

If your laptop underperforms, the order to work through is this: plug it in, set performance mode, check whether you have a MUX switch, and lift it off the desk. All four are free and cover the majority of cases.

If it still doesn’t add up after that, the likeliest explanation is that your expectations came from a desktop GPU with the same name — and that gap isn’t something any setting adjusts.

Deciding what to buy rather than fixing what you have? Start with the best gaming laptops of 2026, or check whether a desktop PC suits you better — it gives more performance per dollar when you don’t need to carry it.