Microstuttering in Games, How to Fix?

[Raven_Claw04]

hello, recently, in games, whenever i would walk or run around, glide across the map at a really high altitude, enter a new area or when i drag the mouse to look around there would be a microstutter, which happens almost all the time when i do the aforementioned things. The FPS goes to 57 from 60, but sometimes it does not drop when this happens, but the microstutter is there and sometimes the game feels choppy for a while before going back to normal. PC specs are i3-4160, GTX 750 Ti, 8 GB of Ram, sandisk ultra II 480 gb ssd, and an 800w psu. Games in question are Assassin's Creed 3/Rogue, and Arkham Origins.

 

[gamerk316]

Thats going to happen with an i3 from time to time. What's going on is the i3 is periodically getting overloaded or some system task is taking CPU time, both of which will cause latency problems.

Remember, your monitor wants a new frame every 16ms. FPS is just an average; just because you are getting 60 FPS does not mean a new frame will be created every 16ms. On lower end processors, its possible (and likely) that you will occasionally miss that 16ms window once or twice, causing the gameplay to jump due to the same frame needing to be displayed multiple times.

So what happens is the i3 is preventing the GPU from creating a new frame in a timely manner, so the monitor will display the same frame multiple times until the CPU/GPU can catch up, which results in microstutter. This can occur even if FPS is near 60. This phenomina is why most review sites now do some form of latency based benchmarking, in addition to traditional FPS testing.

 

[Raven_Claw04]

Thats going to happen with an i3 from time to time. What's going on is the i3 is periodically getting overloaded or some system task is taking CPU time, both of which will cause latency problems.

Remember, your monitor wants a new frame every 16ms. FPS is just an average; just because you are getting 60 FPS does not mean a new frame will be created every 16ms. On lower end processors, its possible (and likely) that you will occasionally miss that 16ms window once or twice, causing the gameplay to jump due to the same frame needing to be displayed multiple times.

So what happens is the i3 is preventing the GPU from creating a new frame in a timely manner, so the monitor will display the same frame multiple times until the CPU/GPU can catch up, which results in microstutter. This can occur even if FPS is near 60. This phenomina is why most review sites now do some form of latency based benchmarking, in addition to traditional FPS testing.

i see, thank you for replying, the only things running in the background are avast antivirus and realtek audio manager, ill see to it that i disable them, at least only when i game, what other system tasks or services and stuff like that should i disable? to get more cpu time for the games

 

[TerryLaze]

whenever i would walk or run around, glide across the map at a really high altitude, enter a new area or when i drag the mouse to look around there would be a microstutter,

If it only happens in these scenarios then it has nothing to do with background tasks or the i3 being too weak.
If it where due to the i3 it would be completely random.

In the cases you describe a lot of loading new assets takes place so it could be anything from slow disk to the GPU not keeping up while it loads new textures or something.
If you are familiar with msi afterburner then use it to monitor your GPU usage when this happens if it drops without any of the cores hitting ~100% then it's most likely the gpu loading stuff.

 

[Raven_Claw04]

whenever i would walk or run around, glide across the map at a really high altitude, enter a new area or when i drag the mouse to look around there would be a microstutter,

If it only happens in these scenarios then it has nothing to do with background tasks or the i3 being too weak.
If it where due to the i3 it would be completely random.

In the cases you describe a lot of loading new assets takes place so it could be anything from slow disk to the GPU not keeping up while it loads new textures or something.
If you are familiar with msi afterburner then use it to monitor your GPU usage when this happens if it drops without any of the cores hitting ~100% then it's most likely the gpu loading stuff.

i see, yes im familiar with msi afterburner, ill start using it again to monitor my gpu usage and try to oc it to allow it to keep up, it cant be my drive since its an ssd and it loads everything else as fast as it did since i installed it on my pc, but the cores do sometimes hit 90+ during these scenarios. btw thanks for replying!