Question Intermittent Microstuttering with Legion 5 Pro

[leonel_1511]

Hi everyone,
I have recently bought my first gaming laptop - the Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with a RTX 3070 with a AMD Ryzen 7 5800H and 16 Gb of RAM (I have checked, using ZenTimings that this RAM does not have the usual bad timings that seem to occcur in some Legion 5 Pro). While I am being able to maintain very good frame rates in most games I have tried (I am using MSI Afterburner with RTSS to keep a steady frame rate and monitor it), I keep on getting microstutters here and there. These seem to occur most often while traversing around (it appears to be related with the loading of new assets when travelling to new areas) or when there are new effects on screen. These microstutters appear as a clear spike in the frametime graph - they do not appear to be the typical fps drops as they keep on occurring even when I lower settings or resolution. I wonder if this is just something normal in some PC games, as I am much more used to consoles where I was not used to such microstutters apart from specific games that have bad frame pacing. Yet, I feel too many games are presenting the same issue. I would like to know if someone has suggestions on what might be causing this and how I can correct it. See the link below for my post in reddit where I give two specific examples in Mortal Shell and Plague Tale Innocence. Thanks!

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/v55awf/intermittent_frame_time_spikes/


I ran a benchmark here

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/53039745

which suggests that the only thing that is less than ideal is my RAM. Could this be a RAM issue? I wanted to understand if this is something I can resolve or if it justifies returning my unit while I still can.

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

I wish Userbenchmark wasn't in existence due to their method of testing and ranking hardware. You have a 2x8GB ram kit rated to run at DDR4-3200MHz, you might want to see if you've got any BIOS updates pending for you laptop. You could try and rid your platform of GPU drivers using DDU, download the latest GPU driver from Nvidia and then manually reinstall your GPU driver in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

 

[leonel_1511]

Thank you very much for your suggestions. I just tried both but none solved the issue - there was indeed an update for the BIOS, but it did not solve the issue.

 

[leonel_1511]

After testing some more games, I can clearly tell that the stuttering is related with the loading of new assets or autosaving and checkpoints. They seem like what is sometimes called I/O stutters. Curiously, I tried to run Plague Tale Innocence in my PS5 to see what happens in a specific place where the stutter is very severe in my laptop - the stutter is also there but barely noticeable if you do not know about it. I wonder if knowing this says more about where the problem might be.