Background Applications and Game Performance
Closing everything in Task Manager is a blunt instrument. A few specific categories cause nearly all the damage.
The short answer
Background applications affect gaming performance mainly through overlay injection, continuous disk activity, and processor contention, rather than through memory usage as commonly assumed. Overlays from communication and recording software are the most frequent cause of stutter because they insert themselves into the rendering pipeline. Identifying which specific applications are active during play is more effective than closing everything indiscriminately.
Verified and last updated August 12, 2026.
- Time needed
- 11 min
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- Read time
- 3 min
The standard advice is to close everything before gaming, which is unnecessary and also misses the applications that actually matter.
The damage comes from three specific mechanisms, and memory usage is not one of them.
Free memory does nothing
Unused RAM provides no performance benefit. Closing applications to free memory is the most commonly given and least useful advice in this area.
What actually costs you performance
Overlays are the main offender
Every overlay injects itself into the game's rendering pipeline. That is how it draws on top of the game, and it is inherently invasive.
One well-behaved overlay is usually fine. Four simultaneously is a meaningful stutter risk and a common cause of crashes that appear random.
Audit what you actually have running: communication software, Steam, Epic, graphics vendor overlay, recording software, peripheral software, and sometimes the operating system's own game bar.
Disable the ones you do not use. Keep one if you rely on it. The stuttering guide covers this alongside the other causes of inconsistent frame pacing.
Disk activity during loading
Cloud sync clients, backup software and antivirus scans all compete for disk access at exactly the wrong moment.
For antivirus specifically, adding your game installation folders as exclusions is a targeted fix that keeps protection everywhere else. Given the size of modern game libraries, real-time scanning during loads is a genuine cost.
Pause cloud sync clients before playing. Most offer a pause option that resumes automatically.
Browsers, specifically
Modern browsers run each tab as a separate process and several keep working while in the background.
Video playing in a tab is the worst case, because it uses hardware decoding on the same graphics card the game needs. A single background video can cost several frames per second.
Close the browser for demanding games. For less demanding ones, closing video tabs is usually sufficient.
What to actually do before playing
- Close the browser, or at minimum any video tabs
- Pause cloud sync
- Disable overlays you do not use, once, permanently
- Add game folders to antivirus exclusions, once, permanently
- Ignore memory usage entirely
Two of those are one-time configuration rather than a routine. The routine part is just closing the browser.
The Windows settings guide covers the system-level configuration, and the memory leaks guide covers the case where a game itself consumes memory progressively.
What works
What doesn't
Key takeaways
Frequently asked questions
Does closing apps to free memory improve frame rate?
Rarely, because unused memory provides no benefit and Windows manages allocation well. Free memory sitting idle does nothing for performance. The real costs from background applications are overlay injection, disk activity and processor contention, none of which relate to how much memory is free.
Which overlays cause the most problems?
Any that inject into the rendering pipeline, which includes communication software, recording tools, storefront overlays and graphics vendor overlays. Running several simultaneously multiplies the chance of a conflict. Disabling the ones you do not actively use is one of the highest-value changes available for stutter specifically.
Do browsers affect gaming performance?
Substantially, particularly with many tabs open, because modern browsers run each tab as a separate process and several continue working in the background. Video playing in a tab is especially costly since it uses hardware decoding on the same graphics card. Closing the browser during demanding games is worthwhile.
What about antivirus scanning?
Real-time scanning of game files during loading causes measurable delays and occasional stutter. Adding your game installation folders as exclusions in your antivirus resolves this without disabling protection generally. This is a targeted change rather than a blanket one and is worth doing for large game libraries.
About the author
PC Hardware & Performance Editor
Marcus has been building, breaking and repairing gaming PCs since 2011, first as a weekend favour for friends and then for eight years as a bench technician at an independent repair shop in Portland, where roughly a third of the job was diagnosing machines that "ran fine yesterday".
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