Tweak These Settings for Longer Game Time on Your Gaming Laptop

Gaming laptops are a great blend of portability and power, but you can usually only get one or the other at a time. Plug your laptop in and you can have top-notch graphics, but as soon as you unplug, all those polygons will drain your battery faster than you can say "Play of the game." Fortunately, there are some ways to mitigate this downside.

The good news is that gaming laptop manufacturers have invested a good deal of effort into tools that will try to balance GPU performance with battery savings. Your laptop may have even come out of the box configured with some of my suggestions, but this varies widely by manufacturer, so be sure to check yours anyway.

It's also important to note that battery life savings will vary widely by what type of game you play. A laptop that can last all day playing Stardew Valley will obviously die much faster while cranking through frames in games like Overwatch 2 or Marvel Rivals . Which is to say, based on what game your playing, your mileage will vary a lot . Experimentation is your friend here.

Set battery-specific default options

Windows can set different power settings when you disconnect your laptop from a power source, and this is where your tweaking should start. Here are just a few things you can adjust to start with:

Switch your power mode: In the Windows Settings app, head to System > Power & battery and under "Power" you can choose from a few basic power modes. Most laptops default to Balanced, but you can switch to "Best power efficiency." In this mode, Windows will make small changes like turning off the screen sooner or limiting the CPU clock speed to save more power.
Put your display to sleep faster. Your laptop's screen is one of the biggest battery drains, and every minute it's on while you're not using it is power wasted. If the default is set to around five minutes or longer, you can save a decent chunk of battery by switching this to one minute.
Check your manufacturer's software: Companies like Razer, MSI, and Asus have their own software preloaded on gaming laptops that provide more settings you can fiddle with. Some settings, like switching refresh rate (more on that below) when you're on battery power aren't available in base Windows, so be sure to check what's available.

The more settings you can set to automatically change while on battery, the less you have to fiddle with every time you try to play games on the go. And there are, unfortunately, still quite a few that won't change automatically.

Adjust your screen's refresh rate.

Another way your display consumes battery life relates to its refresh rate. Although numerous games manage well at 60 or even 30 frames per second (fps), certain quick-action and high-competition titles might benefit from fps rates reaching into the triple digits. Unless you’re engaged in gaming scenarios involving swift enemy movements across the screen, lowering this setting could help conserve battery power. ton By altering the refresh rate to exert control.

Significantly, "refresh rate" differs from a game's FPS. Many games offer options to cap the number of frames generated. This capping helps conserve battery life since the GPU does not expend unnecessary energy rendering excess frames. Nonetheless, adjusting this setting won’t alter your monitor’s refresh rate; hence, the screen continues to refresh more frequently than required unless you modify the display's inherent refresh speed.

Look up "Display Settings" within your Start menu and choose "Advanced display" at the lower part of the list. Here, you will find an option to adjust the refresh rate of your monitor. Keep in mind that modifying this requires manual intervention each time; thus, check whether your device’s maker offers software capable of adjusting the refresh rate when running on batteries.

Disable the extra lighting—including the backlights

The main characteristics that set apart a gaming laptop include RGB lighting, a top-notch graphics card, and superior display quality. in that order . And while your device will cease spiritually Since this is a gaming laptop, turning off all the vibrant lighting should help conserve some battery power.

LEDs by themselves do not consume excessive amounts of power, yet many companies provide software for coordinating lighting effects and making the lights interact with games. Disabling these features won’t suddenly extend your gaming session by multiple hours, but the energy saved can still be significant.

You can also save a little extra power by turning off your keyboard backlight, and more by dimming your display brightness. The latter will depend heavily on what type of display you have. LCD displays have a backlight that shines through color pixels, while OLED-based displays light each pixel individually. In both cases, dimming your display will save a bit of power, but how much will depend on your display.

Adjust your game's graphics settings

You spent three months' rent on a gaming laptop with an RTX 4090 inside, and I'm about to suggest you play on Medium settings? Who do I think I am? Well, all that power doesn't mean much if your laptop dies 20 minutes after you start. So, if you're not connected to a power source, maybe turn the ray-tracing off.

If your games have graphics presets, try starting with the lowest settings and work your way up. Most games that have really power-hungry features like ray-tracing will automatically turn these off at lower presets, so you can get a baseline of how long your battery lasts, then slowly bump the graphics up as needed.

Disable all the preloaded junk

You purchased this laptop specifically for gaming, yet it remains a Windows device. This implies it likely includes additional software from Microsoft or the manufacturer that isn’t related to gaming—for instance, Microsoft Teams was actually running in the background when I checked. the ROG Ally , is one example.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open your task manager on your laptop and examine which processes are operating behind the scenes. Although some may represent essential utilities for your games (which you should avoid altering), you likely don’t require programs like Teams or OneDrive to run continuously in the background.

You might want to check out any applications active in the system tray to identify unnecessary bloatware programs. Usually, gaming laptops include pre-installed software related to gaming; however, if there’s additional unwanted stuff, make sure to turn it off.

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