Frames skipping occasionally

[omeadk]

Howdy, I recently just started getting this weird frame issue where while I'm gaming (and possibly while streaming but can't tell). I randomly get "skipped" frames/micro-lag for less than half a second even while I'm getting 300+ frames normally. If these frame skips occur it will be most often during loading of new animations like in Hearthstone, or if I change camera angles fast in CS:GO... It has been happening on Hearthstone, CS:GO, and Diablo 3 and started about five days ago or so. The frequency of these micro-frame skips changes often... sometimes it happens once every 2 or 3 minutes and other times maybe once an hour.

Things I've tried:
Installing all of my Windows updates
Updating nVidia drivers, and using previous driver versions as well
Checking temperature of components (all of them are fine)
Removing video card and putting it back in

My basic specs:
i7 3770 3.4ghz
geforce 750 ti
20 gb ram (using two 2GB sticks of ram from a previous computer)
128 gb ssd, 1tb hd
Corsair TX 750W Power Supply (about 5 years old)

Not really sure what the issue could be at this point. The only things I can really think of is possibly a power supply issue or potentially RAM.

 

[alexandergc]

Sounds like you have a screen tearing issue.
1) If you can deal with the slight delay in your mouse input, try turning on Vsync and see how that goes.

2) Your 20GB RAM config is weird and might be causing the stuttering.
Is that a 2x8Gb + 2x2GB? Because if so, you need to make sure the matched pairs are on the same DDR channels.
The RAM slots will usually be coloured according to channel, so that's a good hint to look for.

3) Alternative to (1), I would also suggest turning on Adaptive Vsync in your Nvidia Control Panel (not GeForce Experience) or getting a tuning software like EVGA Precision/MSI Afterburner to adjust the Frame Rate Target. A good value would be +10 the refresh rate of your screen.
e.g: 60Hz screen = 70FPS target.

The reason for this is so that your GPU doesn't clock up to maximum power, render a bunch of useless frames, then throttle down due to heat a minute or so later. This might be the main cause of your stuttering, since you say you're getting 300+FPS in your games.
While many people will argue about the benefits of higher frame rates, I am of the belief that anything above your monitor refresh is useless and 60FPS is still the golden benchmark for smoothness in games.

Hope this helps.

 

[omeadk]

It's not a screen tearing issue. I've had that problem before and this is just like a microstutter type problem. Happens very infrequently but my frame essentially "skips" to the next one. It's basically a 1/10th of a second freeze if even that.

I guess I forgot to mention I tried messing around with Vsync before and that didn't seem to fix anything. And as far as the RAM goes yes its that setup, and they are matched correctly.

 

[alexandergc]

Well...in that case, it might be a disk access issue, especially if it only occurs when loading new animations or areas.
That's the best I can think of right now, seeing as you've already tried some steps to troubleshoot it.
Based on your specs, there shouldn't even be a problem, so this is definitely weird.

Just in case, try removing the 2x2GB sticks and see how that works?

*edit*
A thought just occured to me that it might be your network that's causing these issues, seeing as all those games you mention are online games. I'm not really sure how you can troubleshoot a network issue of this kind though, so we'll have to hope someone with better knowledge comes along.

 

[omeadk]

Is there a way for me to check if it could be a disk issue?

 

[alexandergc]

Is there a way for me to check if it could be a disk issue?

if you have multiple screens, try putting up the Win8(or higher) Task Manager on the 2nd screen so that you can monitor your HDD access activity.

If you run Win7 or lower, the Resource Monitor works the same and even shows you the disk command queue depth.
If your disks are not the bottleneck, you should be seeing relatively low peaks in activity and a disk queue depth of <1.

Other than that, you could try running disk info/benchmark tools like HDTune or CrystalDiskInfo/CrystalDiskMark. They really help gauge just how fast your drives are performing. My personal recommendation is CrystalDiskMark for benching, as it lets you test Sequential and 4k Randoms with both compressible and non-compressible data (compression is a big performance issue with SSDs).