GTA V Stuttering/Lag after certain time FIX

[toastedwholegrain]

Hello, i have recently discovered a fix for the stuttering/lag in gta v. i noticed a lot of people having this problem, but this is a specific fix so make sure your stuttering/lag issue meets this criteria

■ Stutter/lag begins after approximately 10-20 min of gameplay (gta would run fine to start off)
■ You notice disk usage is at 100% and correlates to the lag/stutter

THE FIX:
install gta, your os, and all drivers needed to run your computer and the game onto another drive. i recommend a SSD if possible because i have noticed read speeds hitting 80mbs (basically dont rely on any old drives, use a new/reliable one)
THE PROBLEM:
FAULTY HDD (slow read/write speed)

how to check if disk usage is hitting 100% and correlates to stutter in game
put gta in windowed mode and the lowest graphical settings possible. you can put the game into windowed mode by pressing [ALT+ENTER] or going into your graphics settings. make sure all graphics settings are at its lowest so you can rule your graphics card out. pull up task manager and go to the performance tab (tab might be named something different, im using windows 8.1) (its the tab that has graphs showing cpu, disk, and/or ram usage) so from there you can monitor your disk usage while in game, and from there you can see if the lag is related to disk usage

Diagnosis
after i had moved solely gta v onto a brand new ssd, i still noticed disk usage hitting 100% and that matching stutter in game. so i decided to fresh install windows onto my ssd without my hdd or any other drives plugged in, and ran everything off my ssd. finally it worked without 10-20 minute delayed stutters. so not only is it pulling game files from gta, but it may be using driver files, or (highly unlikely, but im not a cs major) some os files that are on your hdd.


how i came to this conclusion
so i started out with a pretty crappy rig i built around 2009ish, barely ran gta and i upgraded part by part. my old rig's specs consisted of this

Gigabyte 790gpt-ud3h
Amd phenom 2 x2 callisto 3.1ghz black edition
G. skill 2x2gb (4gb) 1333mhz
Xfx 1gb radeon 4890 black edition
WD 1tb hdd WD1001FALS-00J7B1 (the culprit!!)
Enermax 720 watt power supply
Windows 8.1 64 bit

I had actually started out with win 7 pro at 32 bit but that was the first thing i had to replace, as gta (and most games these days) require 64 bit os. after that i picked up another 4gb 2x2 ram 1333 and slapped that in. this was still not enough so i figured out how to unlock 2 dormant cores in my cpu making it a quadcore and also turning its name on any hardware monitoring, like task manager, to the phenom 2 b50 x4 signifying 4 cores. my rig at this point looked like this

Gigabyte 790gpt-ud3h
Amd phenom 2 x4 B50 3.1ghz (even messed around with overclocking and got up to a stable 3.6ghz, but settled at the default 3.1 seeing as it made no difference)
G. skill 2x2gb (4gb) 1333mhz
Patriot 2x2gb (4gb) 1333mhz
Xfx 1gb radeon 4890 black edition
WD 1tb hdd WD1001FALS-00J7B1 (the culprit!!)
Enermax 720 watt power supply
Windows 8.1 64 bit

finally i could run gta at a semi decent rate. the game would run smoothly for the first 10-20 min (as described above and by many other forums online) then the game would stutter/lag, even my friends that rode in cars with me said that traffic around us was teleporting whenever we would go on rides. although flying at a high at a high enough altitude to where the ground and buildings didnt render in was fine. loading screens, cutscenes and character switching were also effected by this 20 minute delayed stutter. i played with this setup for around a month until recently i started upgrading more parts. at this point i was in windowed mode at the lowest settings and pulling up task manager to see how my system was being taxed. i noticed ram was fine, gta would only hit up to 6.6ish of my total 8gb, cpu was not at 100% like it was before as a dual core, but i wasnt paying too much attention to disk usage.

then i started to make changes to my rig, i made significant changes, swapped my cpu, motherboard, and ram out. so my setup looked like this

Msi 970 gaming
Amd fx 8350 8-core at 4ghz
Patriot 2x4gb (8gb) 1866mhz viper 3 (actually running at 1600, my mobo doesnt like it at 1866)
Xfx 1gb radeon 4890 black edition
WD 1tb hdd WD1001FALS-00J7B1 (the culprit!!)
Enermax 720 watt power supply
Windows 8.1 64 bit

after all this i still had stutter after around 20 min of gameplay or a couple loading screens. the only difference changing these parts out had was it made my smooth, non-driving parts of gameplay a bit smoother. then at this point is when i noticed my disk usage being maxed out, and that being pretty much in sync with my stutters. so i went out and grabbed a new ssd, put gta v on there, deleted gta v from my hdd so it was running only from my ssd and STILL it had stutters, although not as badly. my next and final effort was unplugging my hdd, installing a fresh copy of windows and all the same drivers i had on my hdd. i even went through the hundreds of windows updates (stupid windows update kb3000850 a 700mb update had not and wont update). after that since i had to format my drive for a fresh windows install, i redownloaded gta. finally, after all the monotony, gta did not stutter after 20 min of gameplay. i played for about 3 hours straight, ran a couple heist, flew around, drove quickly and the game did not stutter like it did. although i know my 1gb gpu is holding me back and i do experience minor lag but thats about it.
my current setup now looks like this

Msi 970 gaming
Amd fx 8350 8-core at 4ghz
Patriot 2x4gb (8gb) 1866mhz viper 3 (actually running at 1600, my mobo doesnt like it at 1866)
Xfx 1gb radeon 4890 black edition
Pny cs1100 120gb ssd (can boot, run steam, and gta on its own without other hdds plugged in)
WD 1tb hdd WD1001FALS-00J7B1
Enermax 720 watt power supply
Windows 8.1 64 bit

i know this was lengthy and anecdote ridden, but hopefully it will help rockstar and others to diagnose and fix this problem.

See you on gta v!

 

[toastedwholegrain]

SOLUTION IN POST ABOVE
i posted this solution here because tomshardware and its community were very knowledgeable and great mannered in helping me setup my rig.
SOLUTION IN POST ABOVE
crap i cant select my own answer as a solution, can someone post here telling others to look at the first post and ill mark that as a solution so this will be solved.

 

[gamerk316]

This is kinda expected. It's assumed the "root" problem with GTA is a memory leak, and being a 64-bit application, this would cause well over 4GB of RAM to be used. This would cause a lot of excessive paging, which is almost totally dependent on HDD performance. And as the Page File is always installed on the Windows partition, which in your case was the HDD, that becomes your limiting factor.

What you're solution basically does is hide the problem of excessive paging by using a faster SSD, so you don't notice the problem. It's still occurring behind the scenes, but it isn't ruining performance, just the SSDs long term lifespan.