Question Sudden stutter / frame skip in Dirt Rally 1.0

[m11k]

Hello everyone,

Dirt Rally 1.0 suddenly begins to stutter when it ran smooth for the whole time. Sometimes I can drive a track at perfect performance and all of sudden the same track begins to stutter. The shown frames from the steam overlay don't show any frames drop though. It also appears more like some frames are skipped and not shown. Almost like I'd have online lag or something like that, though I play in singleplayer. I play the game with an Xbox 360 controller. It makes no difference which graphic settings I use. Even on low the problem exists.

Here are the things I tried already:

Updated/reinstalled all drivers including: graphics card, usb, network, chipset, bios
Updated OS
Changed CPU clock from 4Ghz to 4.4Ghz and back again
Moved gamefiles to other HDD (SSD)
Unplugging the controller, plug it into several other slots again
Checked HDD/RAM for errors
Benchmarks for GPU (Problem doesn't occur there (Furmark, 3D Mark))
Checked for temperature problems
deactivated steam overlay
Disabled Nvidia features in, changed them as well as the ingame configuration, but it doesn't matter which one I take, even on low the problem occurs
Checked DXdiag for errors
deactivated Vsync / activated Vsync

When the problem occurs, the GPU, CPU, RAM or HD aren't anywhere near 100%
I feel like I tried nearly everything possible and I have no clue how to fix that issue. Here are my system specs:

OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Home
Version 10.0.18362 Build 18362

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz, 4008 MHz, 4 Kern(e), 8 logische(r)
BIOS-Version: American Megatrends Inc. 1.I0, 26.06.2018
Mainboard: MSI Z170A GAMING M5 (MS-7977)
Graphic: GeForce GTX 970 Gaming 4G
RAM: DIMM 32 GB DDR4-2133
Audio: Realtech High Definition Audio / Scarlett 2i2 USB
HDD: MZ-75E500B 500 GB, Solid State Drive
Powersupply: POWER ZONE 750W

If someone has another idea, that'd be great. Thank you in advance!

 

[m11k]

Alright, so I've done a bit more research. I reinstalled windows as well as the game itself. Since it didn't fix the issue, I was certain that the problem must be hardware related then.

So I checked the bios and saw that the CPU was capped at 800Mhz. The same value got shown in windows as well. To fix that, I made a CMOS reset (via battery eject). After that the CPU value was shown as normal, but the problem still existed. After a while, the CPU value jumped back to 800Mhz again.

So I monitored my CPU with the Intel Extreme Tuning Util and saw that the CPU got constantly thermal throttled to 800Mhz, even though the temperature is around 30-40°C and nothing critical.

So I went to the bios and deactivated the thermal fault safe and booted up windows again. Temperatures are still perfect, but now the thermal throtteling doesn't happen anymore. After a test in Dirt and a few other games, I can confirm that this was the issue and everything runs smooth as normal.

Now my question is, what issues that's problem? I really don't like to leave this feature turned off as it is quite important in case something happens. At the moment I monitor the temperature at all times and they never exceed 60°C. Why does the thermal throttling happen and what can i do about it?

Thank you guys in advance!