Question Game Stuttering Every 30 Seconds on the Dot?

Jun 1, 2021
5
0
10
Ever since last week, I've been experiencing a very odd stuttering issue, exclusively in the game Paladins. Every 30 seconds exactly, my FPS stutters quite badly no matter how high or low my settings are, whether I'm in fullscreen or windowed, whether I have anything else open on my PC, etc. My ping remains stable, so I'm sure it isn't a server issue. I've tried every combination of V-Sync, FreeSync, AMD Chill and AMD FRTC I could to try to find a framerate I could escape from the stutters at, but even when capped as low as 30fps the problem persists, which perplexes me as I used to be able to run the game perfectly fine without capping the framerate at all.

I've reinstalled it, installed it on my hard drive instead of my SSD, reinstalled Steam, ran a malwarebytes scan, dusted my PC out, monitored my temperatures (they seem totally fine), checked for Windows and driver updates, disabled Windows 10 background apps (all of them), disabled everything I could from opening on startup, disabled unused devices in device manager, and checked with the game's community to see if anyone else is affected by this (it's just me). I'm at an absolute loss as to what I should do next. My assumption was that I had something running that was refreshing itself every 30 seconds and spiking my CPU usage in the process, but task manager and resource monitor don't display anything out of the ordinary, and my CPU usage hangs out around 40% while I have the game running.

If it helps, here are my specs (although again, I used to be able to run the game just fine and no other games are affected)
AMD Radeon R9 380 w/4GB VRAM
AMD FX-8350
Gigabyte 970A-DS3P
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 RAM @1866mhz
1TB HDD
200GB SSD

If you can think of anything I've yet to try please drop me a line, as I'm completely stumped on this. Thanks for reading, and have a good one <3
 
Jun 1, 2021
13
3
15
Page file turned off in windows?

Sound like the game is doing a garbage collection. I had a similar problem in KSP and had to get a mod to increase memory allocated to the game. It still stuttered once every 10 minutes but it was much more playable
 
Jun 1, 2021
5
0
10
Page file turned off in windows?

Sound like the game is doing a garbage collection. I had a similar problem in KSP and had to get a mod to increase memory allocated to the game. It still stuttered once every 10 minutes but it was much more playable

I haven't messed with page file, isn't it best not to for stability reasons?

Could be a garbage collection yeah, it's just strange that it took this long to start happening. Best case scenario it's an issue on their end that's being worked on, but my hopes aren't high
 
Jun 1, 2021
13
3
15
I have had my page file turned off for the last 10 years but my systems have tended to have a lot of memory. With 16GB you should be fine unless you are doing something crazy like chia plotting or complex sims or FEA simulations.
 

purple_banana

Commendable
Apr 27, 2021
6
1
1,515
Did you ever find a solution for this? I have the same problem (albeit with a different game) and it has been driving me nuts.

i tried turning off the page file as suggested but it did not rectify the issue for me. Curiously, I found when I pulled the ethernet cable out the issue stopped, so it’s related to something being online
 
Jun 1, 2021
5
0
10
Did you ever find a solution for this? I have the same problem (albeit with a different game) and it has been driving me nuts.

i tried turning off the page file as suggested but it did not rectify the issue for me. Curiously, I found when I pulled the ethernet cable out the issue stopped, so it’s related to something being online

Unfortunately I haven't, I tried disabling page file and it didn't help, so as a last ditch effort I wiped my entire PC and reinstalled Windows. Even with nothing but Steam and the game installed, the issue persisted, so at this point I'm just giving up and hoping that my problem will be solved in a patch, but I'm not getting my hopes up haha.

That's interesting that taking yourself offline fixed it for you, although the game I'm dealing with is online-only so I can't try that on my end. That makes me think it must be the game trying to refresh something, or a garbage collection taking place like the other user said, but I'm not sure how we might be able to work around something like that on our own.

I wish you the best of luck in fixing it though, and if you ever have more information or questions, feel free to reach out :)
 

purple_banana

Commendable
Apr 27, 2021
6
1
1,515
Unfortunately I haven't, I tried disabling page file and it didn't help, so as a last ditch effort I wiped my entire PC and reinstalled Windows. Even with nothing but Steam and the game installed, the issue persisted, so at this point I'm just giving up and hoping that my problem will be solved in a patch, but I'm not getting my hopes up haha.

That's interesting that taking yourself offline fixed it for you, although the game I'm dealing with is online-only so I can't try that on my end. That makes me think it must be the game trying to refresh something, or a garbage collection taking place like the other user said, but I'm not sure how we might be able to work around something like that on our own.

I wish you the best of luck in fixing it though, and if you ever have more information or questions, feel free to reach out :)

It may be a bit too early to celebrate, I've only had a few mins to test before work - however I might have had a breakthrough! Is your antivirus AVG by any chance? Mine was, and when I ran Multimon, I could see avgToolsSvc.exe was showing activity every 30 seconds and aligned with the same time I was seeing stutters.

For the record, I identified a few other things showing the same pattern too - dasHost.exe (Windows), OVRServer_x64 (Oculus) and spoolsv.exe (Windows). I ruled-out the Oculus one by uninstalling it but the stutter persisted.

So I have removed AVG and chosen an alternate, restarted, tested and as far as I could tell - no stuttering! Going to do more "testing" (gaming) this weekend. Thankfully if AVG was the culprit, there was only a few weeks left on my subscription.
 
Jun 1, 2021
5
0
10
It may be a bit too early to celebrate, I've only had a few mins to test before work - however I might have had a breakthrough! Is your antivirus AVG by any chance? Mine was, and when I ran Multimon, I could see avgToolsSvc.exe was showing activity every 30 seconds and aligned with the same time I was seeing stutters.

For the record, I identified a few other things showing the same pattern too - dasHost.exe (Windows), OVRServer_x64 (Oculus) and spoolsv.exe (Windows). I ruled-out the Oculus one by uninstalling it but the stutter persisted.

So I have removed AVG and chosen an alternate, restarted, tested and as far as I could tell - no stuttering! Going to do more "testing" (gaming) this weekend. Thankfully if AVG was the culprit, there was only a few weeks left on my subscription.

I use Malwarebytes for my antivirus, but the problem persists for me whether I have it open or not (also tested the game without Malwarebytes on my system when I reinstalled Windows, and to no avail). But I'm glad you found a potential solution! Enjoy your game, and hopefully your reply saves some other AVG users the trouble haha!
 
Nov 3, 2021
1
0
10
tl;dr, try disabling network discovery.

I was suffering with this issue until just now, and it had gotten steadily worse over time. The issue got worse once I started using a NAS running TrueNAS Core, and accessing the shares through SMB. It wasn't always this bad, but it was slightly present sometimes before, so I figure there's something else wrong with my PC. This workaround seems to have worked well enough though.

To sum up the symptoms of my problem: Hard stuttering of input devices and monitors, where inputs appear to be dropped until after the stutter ends. The stutters seem to last from about 300-700ms in length, and the monitor stutters too, getting one or two frame updates max during the stutter. These stutters happen almost exactly every 30 seconds. Restarting the PC used to help, but stopped after a while.

In the process hacker 2 network graph, small blips are noticeable at 30 second intervals, at the same times the stutters occur. These are, of course, attributed to dasHost.exe. Disabling Network Discovery results in a single stutter event that lasts longer than usual, and then no more.​
Sorry if this isn't very well structured, but I only wrote this out in Discord earlier, and figured it's better to have this potential workaround/solution out in the open somewhere.

Hardware: Radeon RX 480 8GB, Ryzen 1700, 16GB RAM, 1TB Samsung NVME SSD, 144hz LG monitor running DisplayPort 1.4
OS: Windows 10 LTSC (1809)​
 
Jun 1, 2021
5
0
10
tl;dr, try disabling network discovery.​
I was suffering with this issue until just now, and it had gotten steadily worse over time. The issue got worse once I started using a NAS running TrueNAS Core, and accessing the shares through SMB. It wasn't always this bad, but it was slightly present sometimes before, so I figure there's something else wrong with my PC. This workaround seems to have worked well enough though.​
To sum up the symptoms of my problem: Hard stuttering of input devices and monitors, where inputs appear to be dropped until after the stutter ends. The stutters seem to last from about 300-700ms in length, and the monitor stutters too, getting one or two frame updates max during the stutter. These stutters happen almost exactly every 30 seconds. Restarting the PC used to help, but stopped after a while.​
In the process hacker 2 network graph, small blips are noticeable at 30 second intervals, at the same times the stutters occur. These are, of course, attributed to dasHost.exe. Disabling Network Discovery results in a single stutter event that lasts longer than usual, and then no more.​
Sorry if this isn't very well structured, but I only wrote this out in Discord earlier, and figured it's better to have this potential workaround/solution out in the open somewhere.​
Hardware: Radeon RX 480 8GB, Ryzen 1700, 16GB RAM, 1TB Samsung NVME SSD, 144hz LG monitor running DisplayPort 1.4​
OS: Windows 10 LTSC (1809)​

Hey thanks for your reply,

I did have network discovery enabled, but disabling it didn't solve the problem :( Glad you found a fix for your issue though, and cheers for posting it here - hopefully it can help someone else who's dealing with this sort of thing.

In my case, I think at this point it has to be some obscure hardware issue or a windows process that does something every 30 seconds, much like network discovery seemed to do for you. If you have any suspects I would love to hear them haha, but other than that I'll keep digging and I'll be sure to post it here for everyone if I do solve it on my own. Thanks again and have a good one!