Utility software

6 killer utilities for redlining your gaming rig

Smart players spend time tuning, tweaking, and pushing their systems' capabilities, reaping the benefits of a better gaming experience as a reward. The results are impressive, with games that look and perform better than their developers ever intended. Most of these half-dozen tools are free, and one costs about the same as a drive-through lunch. All of them give you more of a gaming edge.

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OverDrive

Overclock every aspect of your AMD/ATI system with the free OverDrive utility.

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Nvidia Inspector

This package takes a different tack from older videocard utilities, eschewing the system tray for a simple, extensible-pane interface that puts information and card controls front and center.

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Afterburner

Platform-agnostic PC overclockers can tweak their to tweak their video card collection with MSI's venerable Afterburner utility. Designed to work with MSI's own products, Afterburner nonetheless works with most modern hardware.

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x360ce

The free and open source x360ce project was designed to address the problems of using a classic controller for PC gaming. Doing the job Microsoft should have done, x360ce intercepts and translates XInput calls so DirectInput controllers can...

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Xpadder

XPadder emulates a mouse and keyboard with the buttons and directional thumbpad of your game controller. It supports multiple profiles, rumble feedback, and chorded input, which allows for more commands than the number of buttons would normally...

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3.5/5
prices from $10.00
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DOSBox

DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. DOSBox has already been ported to many different platforms, such as Windows, BeOS, Linux, MacOS X...

DOSBox also emulates...

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FXAA Post Process Injector

Get modern graphics on 3D PC games without updates or patches via FXAA Post Process Injector. Originally developed by Nvidia's Timothy Lottes, this tool has been embraced by the modding community and expanded to work with both Nvidia and ATI...

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