No fixes so far work for stuttering problem in games

nfs_boy

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I've had this problem since I first got my gaming PC 9 months ago, and since then I've been trying to solve it on and off. School got in the way so I couldn't focus on it a ton, but I have tried many supposed fixes to the problem and none of worked. This has been especially confusing to me since about 5 months ago, I'd uninstalled and reinstalled my GPU drivers, and the stuttering went away. I thought I had fixed it, but the next day I turned on my computer, the issue reappeared. I repeated uninstalling and reinstalling my GPU drivers to see if it would work again, but for some reason it didn't. Also, I recently swapped out the RAM, but that didn't fix it. Finally, my most recent attempt was to get rid of the common 100% disk usage problem. That helped a little, but didn't get rid of the stuttering. At this point, I am beyond sick and tired of this issue and I need help.

My PC:
Nvidia Ge Force GTX 960 2GB
AMD FX-6350
ASRock 970A-G/3.1
2x Ballistix S 4GB DDR3-1600
Ultra 650W PSU
 

Gallarian

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Sorry to hear your having issues - I appreciate how frustrating this sort of thing can be!

First of all; can you describe what you actually mean by 'stuttering'? Its a word that gets used a lot, but there are several variations of it.

Secondly (I know its tedious, but it does help); can you list all the things you have tried thus far?
 

nfs_boy

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Yeah I've updated all the drivers for my motherboard.
 

Yamitime

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Worth checking.
 

nfs_boy

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By stuttering, I mean quick pauses in my games every couple of seconds.
As for what I've tried, I definitely don't remember everything, but for starters:

I've tried all the 100% disk usage fixes on this website: https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/fix-100-disk-usage-in-task-manager-improve-pc-performance-on-windows-10/#1 (I thought that might be causing it)

I've tried checking my hard drive (it's in good health)

I went to a computer shop where they told me my gpu was operating normally

I've tried overclocking and under clocking my cpu in case of possible throttling

I was told about vrm throttling, but the vrm on my motherboard doesn't really get that hot so I haven't really taken that into consideration

I've tried disabling various cpu functions in my BIOS

Thats all I can really remember right now
 

nfs_boy

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I've been thinking it might be something like a virus, but I've done a full scan with trend micro and they found nothing
 

nfs_boy

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I've checked them, they're all up to date
 

newbcakes

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pagefile... check pagefile settings. I'd recommend active management of the pagefile (rather than system managed). In any other application where you don't care about granular performance, let the system manage it.

You've got a smaller amount of RAM running a game that would likely demand a lot. Your HDD is probably a slower model will little cache, exasperating the problem. The O/S and other actively running apps (such as a virus scanning software with an on-demand component) are chewing away at that RAM. The O/S is working overtime to satisfy everything, which is exactly what an O/S should be doing... except you want it to focus its horsepower on one thing, playing that game.

I think you have a combination of excessive thrashing/disk pagefile usage, going to a slow(er) disk, perhaps compounded by a pagefile that exists on the same disk that is also performing all of the read/write operations for the O/S, game, and other tasks.

Are you able to list your disk specs? (how many, type) Are you able to show your pagefile configuration?

Are you familiar with perfmon and would you want to run some counters which, probably over a very short period of time, would help isolate where the issue originates...

 

nfs_boy

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So your saying I have a slow disk? I think it's possible it could be malfunctioning, but I have a TOSHIBA DT01ACA100 1TB 7200 RPM. Also I'm not sure what pagefiling or perfmon is, I'm not super advanced at this.

EDIT: actually I think I tried to change the pagefiling in the past but it didn't fix my issue
 

newbcakes

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I'm saying that there's a combination of issues and to really isolate the problem, some deeper performance analysis is warranted. Perfmon is relatively easy to use - and it's built into the O/S. There are a lot of articles out there that tell you exactly which performance counters to add for system performance monitoring. I would imagine that with 3-4 hours of use, you'll have the problem figured out.

Additionally, if you have fooled with the pagefile in the past, it may be misconfigured. I'd look at that too. There are utilities, probably from Toshiba, that will analyze your HDD to indicate health.
 

Gallarian

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Things to try:

1) Clean install of GPU drivers using 'DDU' (free driver cleaning program)

2) Going into the Nvidia Control Panel and adjusting the following 3D settings:

- Power Management Mode: 'Prefer Maximum Performance'
- Maximum Pre-rendered Frames: '1'
- Multi-Display / Mixed-GPU acceleration: 'Single Display Performance Mode'
- V-sync: 'On'


Those two steps have always managed to clear any system wide stutter issues for me. Hope it does the same for you.
 


In your signature i think it is aorus motherboard not auros :p.

I m pretty sure it is a storage issue, i have similar issues with my mechanical HDDs. When i move my content to my ssd the issues is fixed. I have 3 HDDs of 2TB in raid 0 and it is a bit better on them but games that requires heavy access to the storage still causes same issues in a few games.
 

nfs_boy

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Ok, but I don't really think I can go out and buy an ssd