Question 3900x, 6800xt stuttering with high fps.

Aug 28, 2022
4
0
10
Hello,

Since I bought my new 6800xt half a year ago I have had a problem in multiple games where they stutter while being on high fps. I honestly tried a lot of stuff and not one seemed to fix it. When it first started I made a post on Reddit in which I did a lot of troubleshooting and at the time I thought I fixed it. But after a few days, I realized it must have been a placebo effect and I didn't bother updating it again then. In that post, I have described what the problem is, there is troubleshooting that I did, and I listed all the steps that I thought fixed the issue. You don't have to read all the comments as they are usually included in my troubleshooting. I will relist here all videos and logs that I recorded then and since that show the problem as well as add what other troubleshooting I did.
TLDR of the problem is that certain games stutter both in gameplay and cutscenes since I upgraded my GPU from 1070 to 6800xt while maintaining high fps ( apart from the moment it stutters then it all goes down).

Videos:
1 God of War: stutters at 0:22, 0:31, 0:54, 1:24
2 God of War: stutters at 0:44 lines 198, 199, 1:07 line 292, 3:05 lines 761, 762, 771, lines are for this log, this one is color coded for when the stutters happen so it's probably the best representation of the problem (also if you only look at this one you will not miss anything from the other ones as the stutters look exactly the same there). Note how all Gpu utilization, Gpu SLCK, GPU Hotspot, GPU PWR, FPS, and CPU Utilization all drop here. All logs are in 0.25s intervals per line.
3 Nioh 2 cutscenes: stutters at 0:00, 0:14, 0:27
4 Cult of the Lamb: stutters every 4-5 seconds from 0:30 onward after I switch from 30 fps capped to uncapped.
Those videos show what the stutters look like and they look the same for every game that I had problems with. For some that I will list, I didn't record them but they looked and log the same.

Logs: God of War lines 114-115, 220-221, Halo Infinite line 230

So since I bought the card the games that the stutter was happening in were: God of War (gameplay and cutscenes), Halo: Infnite Multiplayer, Cyberpunk 2077, The Forgotten City, Elden Ring ( gameplay and cutscenes), Nioh 2 (gameplay and cutscenes), Cult of the Lamb ( gameplay and cutscenes), the ones here that don't have brackets were only gameplay but I didn't test in cutscenes so potentially they were stuttering in cutscenes too).
The games that didn't stutter are: NORCO, Hell Let Loose, Disco Elysium, Cuphead, A Short Hike, Rimworld, Crusader Kings 3. I've played a few other games but it was only for 20min to an hour each and I don't exactly remember if they stuttered but Sable possibly did stutter as well.
The games that played without stutters on my 1070: God of War, Halo: Infinite, Cyberpunk 2077, Nioh 2, Crusader Kings 3 ( this one is fine on both cards).

So apart from the troubleshooting that I did in my Reddit thread, I did:
1. change the monitor and PSU so my setup now is:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
CPU COOLING: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4
MOBO: ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus
GPU: Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT NITRO+ OC SE 16GB
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4 3200 MHz C16
HDD: Seagate Barracude 1TB
SSD: ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB
PSU: Corsair RM850x 80 PLUS Gold
CASE: PHANTEKS Eclipse P400A Drgb
Monitor: Dell S3220DGF 31" 2560x1440 165Mhz
User benchmark
  1. Reinstall my WINDOWS 10 ltsc, then bought Windows 10 Home.
  2. Reinstall my GPU drivers probably 10 times ( with multiple different versions since then as well).
  3. Reinstall my chipset and BIOS driver a few times ( with a couple of new versions as well).
  4. Try adjusting Windows settings ( so many that there is no point in listing them) from multiple youtube video guides on how to fix stutters.
  5. Triy installing games on HDD.
  6. Try launching games in safe mode on steam.
  7. Try overclocking CPU, RAM in BIOS, and GPU in MSI Afterburner and AMD Radeon panel.
All of those were tested in different configurations so for example one windows install with different GPU/Chipset/BIOS drivers and different bios settings and overclocks, then the different drivers and stock settings, then different windows install with other settings, and so on.

So that's about it. I have no idea what this could be. At the moment I'm thinking that it's either:
  1. All of those games have problems with AMD gpus and AMD knows about it but chooses not to communicate with the devs on how to fix it or are not fixing it themselves if it's in their power to do so.
  2. Or that something in my setup doesn't work well with my new GPU for some reason ( thinking maybe it's mobo as it connects to everything else and it didn't have problems with my 1070 but maybe because 6800xt uses some technology that is faulty in my specific mobo cause the stutters).
Honestly, I don't understand how any of this work so these are just guesses really.
I'm kinda losing my mind a bit here and am having huge buyer's remorse because when I bought it I paid £1310 and now it goes for £660, and on top of that I have had those stutters since day one so any help would be hugely appreciated.
 
Last edited:

gambin0

Distinguished
Sep 3, 2012
47
3
18,545
You can always try adding a 60fps cap I know you might have a high refresh rate monitor but start from there. Not sure about andrenaline software if you can cap the frames for single games, give it a try... Worked for me with some games
 
Aug 28, 2022
4
0
10
You can always try adding a 60fps cap I know you might have a high refresh rate monitor but start from there. Not sure about andrenaline software if you can cap the frames for single games, give it a try... Worked for me with some games
Framecaping only seems to help in Cult of the Lamb, in all other games I tried switching resolutions and framerate caps and graphics quality but it wasn't helping.
 
Last edited: