The honest FAQ

It's built to stay out of anti-cheat's way. No kernel driver of our own, no DirectX or graphics hooks, nothing injected into your game, no network filter driver, and it never reads or writes the game's memory. The FPS overlay counts the frames a game hands to Windows, from Windows' own graphics events, on Windows 11, and reads the display's rate from Windows' statistics (the documented D3DKMT API) on Windows 10 — never a renderer hook or injection. Guardian and Extreme Mode raise an Android emulator's priority from outside its process, as Task Manager can, and never change a PC game's own process. Process Rules you create yourself are applied as you set them, except to games BRUTAL recognises that use, or may use, an anti-cheat, and to any game it recognises while an anti-cheat service is running. Each publisher decides what its anti-cheat allows. Full breakdown on the safety page.

It changes what can be changed, and it won't lie to you about the rest. Trimming background junk, a real Ultimate Performance power plan, a 0.5ms timer, leaner network and DWM settings: those are real changes, and the Optimization receipt in History reads back a key setting from each module it can verify, the active power plan, and the timer while a game runs, so you can see they are still in place. The only thing it scores is available memory; frame rate is shown but never scored, so check your own game with the overlay before and after. On Windows 11, the FPS number is the game's own frame rate: BRUTAL counts the frames the game hands to Windows, from Windows' own graphics events, with no injection and no hooks. On Windows 10, and for emulators it doesn't measure yet, it shows the display's rate instead, labelled DISPLAY on the overlay, or DISPLAY CAP when it sits at your refresh rate; while the game is minimised or covered it shows a dash and says why. If your PC is already lean, "No measurable change" is a real answer, and the app says it instead of inventing a number. Honest wins beat fake ones.

No. The free tier is the product, not a trial. You get 17 of the 22 optimization modules, the full FPS overlay, the disk cleaner that reports bytes it actually freed, the disk analyzer, drive health, the whole network lab, the driver scanner, startup manager, privacy center and system repair. The five Pro modules are deep-tuning territory, plus Guardian automation and per-game profiles. Here's the full free-vs-Pro split.

Yes. Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. Some tweaks are build-aware — EcoQoS throttling, for instance, only exists on Windows 11 — so the app applies what your version supports instead of dumping dead registry keys into the wrong OS.

Yes. Registry edits, service control, power plans, driver installs, timer changes — all of it needs elevation. There's no honest way around it. You'll see one UAC prompt at launch. If a tool claims it can do this without admin, it isn't doing it.

Never. Defragging an SSD is the oldest placebo in the book — it burns write cycles for zero gain. SSDs want TRIM, not defrag. BRUTAL reads the media type first. Only a confirmed spinning HDD gets defrag.exe. Flash gets TRIM. The Drive Health page even runs an "SSD truth" panel listing the myths it refuses: disabling SysMain or Prefetch as "endurance", killing the pagefile, multi-pass overwrites. All nonsense. None of it ships.

Persistent registry changes made by rollback-capable modules use protected per-module undo, and a system restore point is attempted before the heavy stuff (System Restore is switched off on many PCs). Undo restores captured state only after the manifest passes integrity and allowlist validation. Transient actions like a cache clean or a process trim can't be "undone" because there's nothing to restore; they free the space and stop. Your personal files are never touched.

Free is the whole product, not a trial: 17 of the 22 optimization modules, the full FPS overlay, the disk cleaner that reports bytes actually freed, the disk analyzer, drive health, the whole network lab, the driver scanner, startup manager, privacy center and system repair. Pro adds automation — Guardian and per-game profiles — plus the five deep-tuning modules and automatic driver updates. Ultra is everything in Pro plus Smart Route, the honest game-traffic relay; measuring your route stays free for everyone. Pro and Ultra renew yearly until you cancel. If Pro ever lapses, the app drops to Free and every optimization you applied stays exactly as it was. Here's the full split.

One PC at a time per key. The license binds to a machine ID derived from your hardware — one person, one PC, one year of Pro. Moving to a new PC? Release it from the old one first, with Move to another PC on the License page in the app or by signing in at brutaloptimizer.com/account, then activate it on the new PC. A license can move twice every 90 days.

The optimizer works on Windows settings, caches and junk — not your documents, photos or game saves. The disk cleaner only clears an allow-list of known-safe locations, then re-reads free space to confirm what it freed. The privacy center exists to switch telemetry off, not to collect any.

Two things. It refuses placebo: no "RAM freed as disk space", no registry "cleaning", no SSD defrag, no invented numbers. And it tunes for real performance, not just junk removal — priority, scheduler, power plan, network stack, timer resolution. The disk cleaner reports the bytes it actually freed, verified by re-reading free space. See everything it does, or the gaming tuning details.

The download is free and needs no account — sign in with your email only to link a licence. Pro is $4.99 (charged as ₹499) a year and adds automation (Guardian, per-game profiles), the five deep-tuning modules and automatic driver updates. Ultra is $9.99 (charged as ₹899) a year and adds Smart Route on top; measuring your route is free for everyone. Both plans renew yearly until you cancel. If Pro ever lapses you drop to Free: every optimization you already applied stays exactly as it was — nothing reverted or held hostage — and there's a 14-day grace window with a renewal nudge first. Get Pro · Get Ultra · see the full breakdown →

No, and it never tries to. BRUTAL ships a Security Center that drives the Microsoft Defender already in Windows — there's no second antivirus engine, no signatures of its own, and it never registers as your security-center AV (doing that would silently disable Defender). There's no "disable Defender" button anywhere. It shows your live protection posture, runs Defender quick/full/folder scans, and offers five reversible one-tap hardening toggles. On top of that, the System Integrity Audit is a native persistence audit — files-at-rest plus WMI metadata, no engine, no driver, no injection — that checks the places malware hides: WMI persistence, IFEO hijacks, rogue scheduled tasks, hosts/proxy redirects, fake processes. Your games are safe: BattlEye, EAC, Riot and emulator components are allow-listed before anything is shown. BRUTAL strengthens Defender; it never replaces it.

It blocks ads, trackers and malware domains across your whole PC — every browser, every app — by switching the active adapter to a filtering DNS resolver (AdGuard). This is filtering DNS, not a hosts-file hack: there's no giant blocklist file to choke Windows DNS and nothing for antivirus to lock. We snapshot your real DNS first, never disable the Windows DNS Client service (we only flush it), and refuse on work or managed PCs. Turning it off restores the captured DNS configuration, with an automatic-DNS fallback if the protected backup is invalid. An optional adult-content category switches to AdGuard Family DNS, and a separate encrypted-DNS (DoH) toggle is offered too. It lives in the Privacy Center.

Smart Optimize selects the modules matched to your hardware tier, and confirms how many of them are flagged Caution before it runs. The full module set is available for explicit review, with system-wide power, network, display, storage, USB, GPU, timer and Windows-security changes marked Caution or Advanced. Disabling VBS/HVCI or Spectre mitigations lowers Windows security and is never part of the automatic default. A restore point is attempted first, and every undoable module writes a validated rollback manifest.