PC gaming is fun, versatile, and chock full of snazzy utility software tailored to supercharge your experience.

If you need to bring a bit more firepower to your online frag sessions, be sure to check out our round ups of the best CPUs for gaming and the best graphics cards, too.

Let’s start with the basics: Altering and monitoring your game hardware performance.

MSI Afterburner is a free utility that works with both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards and allows you to keep tabs on the vital stats for your hardware.

You’ll be able to monitor performance changes depending on the graphics settings you tweak.

There are even channels specifically tailored to help you find that elusive piece of hardware, like new GPUs when they restock?

It also has a great older game library, and plenty of user feedback to help you make a decision on what to play next.

Simply uninstalling a piece of software is often not enough.

Want to video record your awesome game performance and share it with the world.

While OBS Studio does not have the deep community structure and features of Discord, it excels at screen recording, though it has a steeper learning curve than the recording tools built into Windows or your graphics card’s software.

You can automatically overclock your graphics card with Nvidia GeForce Experience or AMD Radeon Software, and even optimize game settings too.

Each also offers Afterburner-esque hardware monitoring tools, and Radeon Software can track your total hours played in each game.

Reshade is free utility that lets you get deep into customization of the graphics and post processing in your games.

Game modding is a vibrant community, ranging from custom worlds to utilities like this that allow you to create the visual settings that you want.

It’s a great utility for folks looking to get better-looking games with the hardware that they currently have