Battlefield 3 Unexplainable Stutter

[Meisgoot312]

Hello fellow forumers,

My Battlefield 3 suffers from a bad case of stuttering, unexplainable stuttering. I have looked across many forums regarding this strange stutter and nothing seems to fix it, I forced Battlefield 3 to buffer only 1 frame, disabled V-sync, and even purchased 8 GBs of RAM (added on top of my 4). I just updated my drivers today also, no fix. I run the game on Ultra, though setting it lower doesn't seem to help.

My specs:
-GTX 480 - Self Overclocked (900 Core clock, 2000 memory clock, 1800 shader clock, 1.125 V) with liquid cooling
-12 GB of RAM (2x2GB Corsair SX3 and 2x4GB (another brand)) Notice, the stuttering was present before the new RAM.
-Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium
-AMD Phenom 2 965 Quad Core 3.4 ghz
-500 GB on a Hybrid-Harddrive

The game runs at a constant 50-100 fps (Rarely lower than 45), but it stutters every second. The game will be fine, then stop, then run, then stop... repeat. This happens after 30 secs - 1 minute into the game.

I have my Nvidia control panel set to maximum performance, no V-sync, no triple buffering, perferred single monitor performance, and other power related options.

Also, my card is not even reaching it's maximum VRAM (1536 MB), it only gets up to 1000, no more than 1100 MB.

Any ideas concerning possible solutions would be great! Thank you.

 

[p000n-tang_be4r]

Can you tell us what temperature your GPU is running at? If it starts to happen after about a minute it sounds like your graphics card is overheating.

 

[Meisgoot312]

My graphics card is liquid cooled and sits at a comfortable 50-55 C, so I don't think it's my graphics card. This situation is frustrating.

 

[p000n-tang_be4r]

Are you overclocking anything else? cpu, ram, north-bridge etc? If you are, try setting everything (including gpu) to default and see if that works.

Good luck

 

[Meisgoot312]

I have figured out the problem! It was a combination of two things, the "low" clock (3.4 ghz) of my CPU and the amount of heat it was giving off (90 C). I upgraded my CPU cooler to the Hyper 212 + cooler (which is awesome for 30 dollars), and overclocked my CPU to 4.0 ghz with 1.5 v and the stuttering is gone!

Before: Phenom II X4 965 BE: 90 C (max load) - 3.4 ghz 1.425v
Now: Phenom II X4 965 BE: 61 C (max load) - 4.0 ghz 1.5v

Note: If you Overclock using AMD Overdrive, you WILL get crazy rubberbanding. If you're going to overclock, do it in system BIOS.

 

[gamerk316]

Well, at 90C, your CPU would be throttling back significantly, so that would do it...