"Game boosters" have a bad reputation because most of them don't actually boost anything — they just show a splash screen, run a placebo animation, and then pop up an ad. The real things that affect FPS on Windows 11 are well understood, and you can do them yourself in under 10 seconds without installing a single piece of questionable software.
This post explains what genuinely helps, what's marketing fluff, and what the free Gaming Mode in RBS PC Cleaner actually does in the background when you click the button.
What actually improves FPS
- Suspend background apps. Chrome with 40 tabs, Discord, Slack, OneDrive indexing — all cost CPU and RAM. Suspending them (not killing them) frees resources.
- Switch to High Performance power plan. Windows 11's "Balanced" plan throttles CPU clocks to save battery. High Performance locks them high.
- Trim standby memory. Windows caches a lot in standby RAM. Trimming forces it to release that for active apps.
- Clear temp files. Some games spill gigabytes into %TEMP% and never clean them — chokes the SSD write cache.
That's it. Disabling SysMain or "optimising" the registry has no measurable FPS effect in 2026.
Why suspending is better than killing
If you kill Discord before a game, you lose voice chat. If you kill Spotify, your music stops. If you kill OneDrive, your cloud sync breaks. If you suspend them instead, they're frozen: zero CPU, zero network, zero disk. When you hit Resume they pick up exactly where they were.
RBS PC Cleaner Gaming Mode
Gaming Mode in RBS PC Cleaner does all four things above with a single click:
- Runs a safe junk clean (temp + recycle bin + browser cache).
- Trims standby memory to release cached RAM back to active use.
- Switches Windows to the High Performance power plan.
- Suspends a curated list of common background apps (Discord, Spotify, OneDrive, Teams, Slack, Chrome background tabs, etc.). You can edit the list.
When you're done playing, hit Resume and everything comes back: power plan returns to your previous setting, suspended apps wake up, nothing is left in a weird state.
What FPS gain to expect
Honest answer: it depends. On a mid-range PC running AAA games at max settings, expect 5–15% higher minimum frame rates (fewer stutters). On a low-end laptop with 8GB RAM, expect bigger wins — often 20–30% — because freeing RAM matters more when there's less of it.
Gaming Mode won't turn a 30 FPS experience into 144 FPS. No free software can. What it does do is stop background junk from stealing cycles while you're trying to play.
Why most "game boosters" are scams
The bigger paid game boosters (Razer Cortex, IObit Game Booster, Wise Game Booster, Smart Game Booster) usually do three things:
- Show you a fake-looking dashboard with green numbers going up. Most of those numbers aren't measuring anything real.
- Defragment your SSD (don't do this — it's bad for SSDs and modern Windows handles SSDs correctly automatically).
- "Optimise the registry" — basically a placebo. Windows registry tuning hasn't moved FPS since Windows 7.
The free ones often bundle adware or browser hijackers. The paid ones charge you for placebo animation. The two genuinely helpful things they could do — suspending background apps and switching the power plan — are exactly what RBS PC Cleaner's Gaming Mode does for free, without the bundled junk.
What about NVIDIA / AMD's own software?
NVIDIA's GeForce Experience and AMD's Adrenalin software both have "game optimisation" features. These are different — they're tweaking graphics settings (resolution, shadow quality, anti-aliasing) inside the game, which genuinely affects FPS. Useful, complementary to system-side optimisation. Use both: the GPU vendor software for in-game settings, Gaming Mode for system-side resource freeing.
One small thing: GeForce Experience and Adrenalin both have always-running background services that themselves use a non-trivial amount of RAM and a few percent of CPU. If you don't use the recording / overlay features, you can disable the background service in their Settings without affecting your driver.
Built-in Windows Game Mode vs. this
Windows 11's built-in Game Mode is mostly about deprioritizing system maintenance (Windows Update, background tasks) while a game has focus. It's fine and you should leave it on. RBS PC Cleaner's Gaming Mode is complementary — it frees RAM, cleans junk, and suspends user-space apps, which Microsoft's Game Mode doesn't touch.
Related articles
- Best Free Startup Manager for Windows 11 — disable apps you don't want loading before gaming.
- How to Free Up RAM on Windows 11 — more RAM = more FPS headroom.
- Clear Discord, Teams, Spotify Cache — reclaim GB before a big game install.
- How to Speed Up Windows 11 — broader speed guide.
- RBS PC Cleaner v1.0.0 Launch — full feature list.