How To Adjust Wallpaper Engine Quality Settings

If Wallpaper Engine is slowing down your PC due to its high CPU usage, it’s essential to change your quality settings. This way, you’ll reduce the Wallpaper Engine CPU usage to stop your computer’s performance from lagging. Fortunately, this is a relatively straightforward process.

This article will explain how to edit your settings so your Wallpaper Engine experience is seamless and your computer performance isn’t compromised.

Editing Wallpaper Engine Settings

The quality settings for Wallpaper Engine are the various levels of performance and graphics the app operates at. The various levels include: High, Low, Medium, and Ultra. Every level has a different trade-off between the performance and graphic quality of your wallpapers. An example is if you run Wallpaper Engine on Ultra, you’ll get the highest graphics quality but your performance may be lower in some systems.

Here are easy steps to change settings in your Wallpaper Engine app and boost your computer’s performance:

1. Launch “Wallpaper Engine” and click on the “Gear” icon.
   
2. In the “Playback” setting, choose your preferences.
3. If your wallpaper is using a lot of CPU performance, set “Quality Preset” to “Low.”
   

Disabling or lowering general settings will also help. Play around with the different settings until you’re satisfied with the quality of your visuals and with your CPU usage. The FPS settings greatly impacts your computer’s performance. If your computer is unable to handle 25 FPS, lower it to 15 or 20.

Updating Your Operating System

It’s important for your computer’s performance that you’re using an up-to-date operating system. In your taskbar, search for “Update.” Download the latest update from your “Check for updates” settings window, and restart your computer. This should ensure that you have less performance issues.

Updating Your Graphics Card Driver

Graphics cards by NVIDIA will boost your GeForce Experience application. Click here and download this application to your computer system. Once the application has been downloaded, open it and in the “Drivers” tab, and choose “Download.” This download then installs the updated GPU, and it only takes a few minutes.

Performance Issues with Specific Applications or Games

When you’re in-game, Wallpaper Engine will pause by default. If you’d like to change this, you can do so within the “Performance” tab in your Wallpaper Engine settings. Most performance issues are caused by the system running out of Video RAM (which is memory on the graphics card), or RAM. If you’d like to have Wallpaper Engine free up memory while you’re in-game, you can change the “Other application full screen” setting to “Stop (free memory),” in your Performance tab in the settings for Wallpaper Engine.

If you find that you’re having issues with a specific software or game, you can change this for only that specific game or software by making an “Application Rule.”

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Go to your “Performance” tab in your Wallpaper Engine settings.
   
2. Next to the “Application Rules,” select the “Edit” option.
   
3. A pop-up will appear, then select “Create New Rule.”
   
4. Edit these settings to create the new rule:
   
   • Application name: The “game.exe” needs to be replaced with your game’s actual .exe file.
   • Condition: Should be set to “Is Running.”
   • Wallpaper playback: Should be set to “Stop (free memory).”
5. To confirm, click on “Create.”
   

When the .exe you used is opened, Wallpaper Engine will remove the wallpapers from the memory.

How to Set up a Multi-Monitor Profile

In the application rules, “Load Profile” refers to the multi-monitor profiles you can configure from the monitor overview. Each profile contains a snapshot of the current playlists and wallpapers for all your screens. When you load a profile, the playlists and wallpapers are placed according to how you configured the profile.

Edit the preferences for your playlists and wallpapers for all monitors, and then in your monitor settings, click on “Save Profile.” Now you can save your set up using a name of your choice. If you make further changes to the set-up, your profile won’t be changed unless you use the “Save Profile” option again. You can set-up or assign several profiles to several apps at the same time. You could make separate profiles for Movies, Music, or Games, and assign each of the profiles to all the .exe files which match the categories.

Setting Your Wallpaper Engine to High Priority

You can set Wallpaper Engine to “High Priority” in the “Task Manager,” if you’d like it to have priority over any other computer processes and run better.

1. In “Task Manager,” right click on “Wallpaper Engine Process.”
   
2. Choose “Set Priority.”
3. Select “High.”

Solving Screensaver Problems

Windows activates your Wallpaper Engine screensaver. If you’re having issues with the screensaver not working as it should be, check whether one of the default Windows screensavers is working fine. Check your Windows energy settings and your Windows screensaver settings to see if your screensaver is using the right timeout and if Wallpaper Engine has been set as the active screensaver.

You can find the installed screensaver in C:\Windows\System32\wpxscreensaver64.scr. Ensure that there is no antivirus app removing this file in error, or stopping it from installing. To uninstall the screensaver manually, you can delete that file. However, don’t delete any other Windows files in your System32 directory.

How to Turn Your Wallpaper Engine Screensaver Off

After a brief period of inactivity, you don’t want any wallpapers to be full screen, you can switch this off in the Wallpaper Engine screensaver functionality. To do so, open the settings for your “Windows Screensaver” and choose “None.” If you’d like to re-enable the screensaver, you can follow the same steps mentioned above.

How to Restore Deleted Wallpapers

If you deleted any of the pre-installed wallpapers that come with Wallpaper Engine and you’d like to restore them, you can do this by removing a configuration file from the “wallpaper_engine” installation directory.

Here’s how to so:

1. Switch off “Wallpaper Engine” by right clicking on the icon in the tray and selecting “Quit.”
   
2. Find the Wallpaper Engine directory and then delete the file named “visibility.json.”
3. When you’ve deleted the file, launch Wallpaper Engine and you’ll see that the default wallpapers have been restored.

Note: If you can’t locate the “visibility.json” file, you can simply re-install Wallpaper Engine, which will restore the default wallpapers.

Change Your Settings for a Smoother Performance

If your computer is lagging and you’d like to get the best performance from specific software or games, you can change how your computer processes images with Wallpaper Engine settings. Changing this will free up your computer’s resources so it then focuses on running that software or game more smoothly.

Has your computer’s performance been affected by Wallpaper Engine? Did you find that playing around with the settings as explained in this article helped? Let us know in the comments section below.