[SOLVED] Stuttering issues

[Saboor44]

Hello! I have a Dell Inspiron 7000 Gaming. It's almost been 3 years since I've purchased it. I mainly play Apex and sometimes few story-driven campaigns and open world games. Since the past 2 weeks, I've been having severe stuttering while playing Apex. The stutter lasts for a full 10 seconds where it drops right from 70-80 FPS to 30-40 FPS and then stabilizes again. It's been a real pain in the butt. Is it because of my machine getting quite old or is it something else? I can't say for sure that it's the game or my laptop because the only game I have right now is Apex. Although, almost a month back, I played Just Cause 3 and i didn't face any problem playing it and neither do i think I faced any stutters with Apex during that time, I can't say for sure. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!

Specs:
Intel i7 7700 HQ @2.80 GHz
Nvidia Geforce 1050 Ti 4 GB
16 GB RAM
1 TB HDD and 256 GB SSD

 

[Phaaze88]

What's the cpu and gpu temps in game - especially during those hiccups?

Have you been keeping up with driver updates?

 

[ubercake]

Also, do you have a frame rate limit set in Nvidia Control Panel? I was having similar issues with COD MW after the Season 2 update and disabling the frame rate limit in Nvidia Control Panel fixed the issue.

 

[Saboor44]

What's the cpu and gpu temps in game - especially during those hiccups?

Have you been keeping up with driver updates?

I use Throttle Stop to keep track of these temps. The CPU usually stays at around 40°-50°C when not under heavy usage and around 60°-70°C while gaming. However, I've seen it even reach 90°C as well sometimes, but I haven't been able to notice it at that very moment. It just shows the max temp as 90°C, when I Alt+Tab out of the game. The GPU stays at 60°-70°C too. And yes, my laptop is fully updated from Windows Updates, to Nvidia and Intel updates.

 

[Saboor44]

Also, do you have a frame rate limit set in Nvidia Control Panel? I was having similar issues with COD MW after the Season 2 update and disabling the frame rate limit in Nvidia Control Panel fixed the issue.

No, I don't have limit set either in game or in the control panel. I've still checked and made sure it stays turned off

 

[Phaaze88]

The default critical temp for that cpu is 100C. It's possible dell set a thermal limit of 90C in the bios.

If you had other games on the laptop we could narrow down whether it's the game itself, or your system.

Home - UserBenchmark

Post the URL to your results.

 

[Saboor44]

The default critical temp for that cpu is 100C. It's possible dell set a thermal limit of 90C in the bios.

If you had other games on the laptop we could narrow down whether it's the game itself, or your system.

Home - UserBenchmark

Post the URL to your results.

Is there a solution and can you please guide me through it?
And yeah I don't have other games but I've researched a lot on Apex's reddit and no one seems to have any stuttering except a few who have frame rate issues, but none of them match my case. I'm almost pretty sure now that it's my laptop.
Also, I've tried reducing the resolution from 1920x1080 to 1600x900 and there is improvement except for the fact that the game looks terrible. I think I'll stick to this resolution until I find a solution or buy a new laptop.

 

[Phaaze88]

Without the bios manual, or something similar, it'd be difficult to do that...
All I could say would be to go into bios, and find the Cpu Thermal Limit/Max Temperature Limit, probably under advanced cpu settings... that's not very helpful, huh?

Home - UserBenchmark
Post the URL to your results. It'll provide a visual sample to work with.

 

[Saboor44]

Without the bios manual, or something similar, it'd be difficult to do that...
All I could say would be to go into bios, and find the Cpu Thermal Limit/Max Temperature Limit, probably under advanced cpu settings... that's not very helpful, huh?

Home - UserBenchmark
Post the URL to your results. It'll provide a visual sample to work with.

I'll try and let you know, thanks for the help nevertheless.
Also, i did a bit of googling and learnt a bit about power limit throttling. I downloaded the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and it shows Power limit throttling as "Yes" when i play. Apparently, it isn't good and there are many guides to remove it. I've never understood any of them, however and i don't wanna mess it up. So can anyone guide me? Thanks again!

 

[Phaaze88]

Removing, or raising the power limit - if it's even possible on that laptop's motherboard, comes with higher power draw(obviously), which also means higher temps.
The power limit may, or may not be locked. You would have to check and see.

Is there a feature listed as All Core/Multi Core Enhancement? That would essentially make the CPU run close to it's single core turbo speeds.

 

[Saboor44]

Removing, or raising the power limit - if it's even possible on that laptop's motherboard, comes with higher power draw(obviously), which also means higher temps.
The power limit may, or may not be locked. You would have to check and see.

Is there a feature listed as All Core/Multi Core Enhancement? That would essentially make the CPU run close to it's single core turbo speeds.

There's an option under "Performance" in the BIOS SETUP with the name "Multi Core Support". It has 4 options: All, 1, 2, 3 and "All" is selected as default.
There's another option "Intel SpeedStep" and it is enabled. It says by enabling it, it places the processor to run at the highest performance state; while disabling it will allow the software to operate the CPU in multiple performance states.
There's also the "Intel TurboBoost" option which is enabled by default as well.
Also, i didn't find any Thermal limit option anywhere in the BIOS. However, I've read on Dell forums that disabling the SpeedStep option have helped a few but at the cost of high temps. They've apparently undervolted their laptops to avoid the overheating problem.
I apologize and appreciate you being so patient with me, I'm not a tech geek 😅

 

[Saboor44]

In any addition to all this, I've also installed Intel TurboBoost Monitor to keep track at my CPU levels, and i think i found my problem. Every time i stutter, I try to minimise out of the game and see my CPU levels and at that very moment, the monitor shows this:

https://imgur.com/sPTuSO8

Sometimes, the green bar doesn't even show implying that it's almost 0 GHz! Any help?

 

[Phaaze88]

You're going to have to do that in windowed mode.
If you minimize, or alt-tab out of a fullscreen game... that's basically idle, and so the cpu does the same.