Change These Settings on Your Gaming Laptop to Save Battery and Play Longer
Gaming laptops are a great combination of portability and power, but you can usually only buy one or the other at a time. Plug in your laptop and you’ll get top-notch graphics, but once you unplug it, all those polygons will drain your battery faster than you can say “Play the game.” Fortunately, there are several ways to mitigate this disadvantage.
The good news is that gaming laptop makers have put a lot of effort into tools that will try to balance GPU performance with battery savings. Your laptop may even come with some of my recommendations, but this varies greatly by manufacturer, so be sure to check yours.
It’s also important to note that battery savings will vary greatly depending on the type of game you play. A laptop that can run all day playing Stardew Valley will obviously die much faster when scrolling frames in games like Overwatch 2 or Marvel Rivals . That is, depending on what game you play, your result will vary greatly . Experiment is your friend here.
Set default settings for a specific battery
Windows can set different power settings when you unplug your laptop from its power source, and this is where your tweaking should begin. Here are just a few things you can configure to get started:
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Switch power modes: In the Windows Settings app, go to System > Power & Battery, and under Power, you can choose from several basic power modes. Most laptops are set to “Balanced” by default, but you can switch to “Best Energy Efficiency.” In this mode, Windows makes small changes, such as turning off the screen earlier or limiting the processor clock speed to save power.
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Put your display to sleep faster. Your laptop screen is one of the biggest drains on your battery, and every minute it’s on while you’re not using it is wasted energy. If the default is set to about five minutes or longer, you can save a good chunk of battery life by switching this value to one minute.
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Check your manufacturer’s software: Companies like Razer, MSI, and Asus have their own software pre-loaded on gaming laptops that provides more settings for you to work with. Some settings, like switching the refresh rate (more on that below) when you’re on battery, aren’t available in the base version of Windows, so be sure to check what’s available.
The more settings you can set to change automatically when running on battery, the less you’ll have to fiddle with every time you try to play games on the go. And, unfortunately, there are still many that will not change automatically.
Change your display’s refresh rate
Another way to drain your display battery is the refresh rate. While many games can reach frame rates of 60 or even 30 frames per second (FPS), some fast-paced and competitive games can reach frame rates in the hundreds. Unless you’re playing a game where enemies move quickly across the screen, you can save a ton of energy by changing the refresh rate.
It’s important to note that “refresh rate” is different from in-game FPS. Most games have some kind of FPS settings that allow you to limit the number of frames the game generates. This will help save battery power because the GPU won’t have to waste energy rendering unnecessary frames. However, without changing the display’s refresh rate, the screen itself will still refresh more often than you need.
Find Display Settings in the Start menu and select Advanced Display at the bottom. From this screen you can change the screen refresh rate. This is a setting you’ll have to change manually each time, so it’s a good idea to first find out if your manufacturer has a tool to automatically change the refresh rate when running on battery.
Turn off unnecessary lighting, including backlighting.
The main features that set a gaming laptop apart are RGB LEDs, a powerful GPU, and high-quality displays ( in that order) . And while your device will no longer spiritually be a gaming laptop the moment you turn off all the colored lights, it will at least save some power.
RGB LEDs themselves aren’t super power-hungry, but most manufacturers include software to control the lighting effects and even make the lighting react to your games. Turning it all off won’t magically give you hours of gameplay, but the energy savings won’t be negligible.
You can also save a little extra power by turning off the keyboard backlight and also lowering the brightness of the display. The latter will greatly depend on what type of display you have. LCD displays have a backlight that shines through the colored pixels, while OLED displays illuminate each pixel individually. In both cases, dimming your display will save some power, but how much will depend on your display.
Adjust your game’s graphics settings
You spent three months renting on a gaming laptop with an RTX 4090 inside and I’m going to tell you to play on medium settings? Who do I think I am? Well, all that power won’t mean much if your laptop dies within 20 minutes of starting up. So, if you are not connected to a power source, perhaps disable ray tracing.
If your games have graphics presets, try starting with the lowest settings and gradually increase them. Most games that have really power-hungry features like ray tracing will automatically disable them at lower settings, so you can get a basic idea of ​​how long your battery is lasting and then slowly ramp up the graphics as needed.
Disable all pre-installed junk
You bought this laptop for gaming, but it still runs Windows. This means that it was probably pre-loaded with some things that Microsoft – or the manufacturer – want to include that have nothing to do with games. Microsoft Teams, an app I even found running in the background on the ROG Ally , is one example.
Press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open the task manager on your laptop and see what processes are running in the background. While some of these may be controversial tools that your games need (you shouldn’t mess with them), you probably don’t need Teams or OneDrive running constantly in the background.
You can also look through any utilities running on the taskbar to find any unnecessary apps you don’t need. Gaming laptops usually come with the software needed to play games, but if there is any extra clutter, disable it.