Misterious STUTTERS I can't find the source to

[(YK)]

Hardware brothers and sisters, help a brother out.

For a couple years now, I've been using a RTX 2060 + RYZEN 5 5600 rig. Pure Joy. That said, a month or two ago, I got a RTX 4070 upgrade to it. BIG bump on performance, sure, but a good deal of stutters to go along with it.

I'm a long Afterburner + RTSS user always keeping my frametime/framerate bar flat as a board and my games as optimized as possible.

Thought it might be drivers so I tried a bunch of them (DDU installs and all).

Guess what?

Nothing.

Same random stutters.

I formatted my PC, updated my BIOS, my MOBO chipset, plugged the 2060 in, disabled Xbox Game Bar, Windows Game Bar, D.O.C.P (XMP), cleared DXCACHE, messed with pagefile, then with all the SYNC options (G-SYNC included) and even bought a RYZEN 7 5700X3D to see if it would make any difference... No difference. It's no thermal throttling either.

Honestly, what else can I test?

Maybe, my MOBO's damaged?

Maybe, my PSU is causing the stutter?

Can my, idk, 4070's LED light cause stutter?


Also, no matter if it's 60 or 120 FPS, the stutter's there.

And thank you for taking the time to read.


FULL RIG:

WINDOWS 10 PRO

RTX 4070 GALAX

RYZEN 7 5700X3D

ASUS B450M PRO S

MSI MAG A650BN 80 PLUS BRONZE

2x16GB 3200hz MEMORY

1TB HD

1TB NVME M.2

[Andrius227]

Try a different DP cable maybe? Or maybe try HDMI to see if that makes a difference.

[(YK)]

Originally posted by Andrius227:

Try a different DP cable maybe? Or maybe try HDMI to see if that makes a difference.

Afraid I already tried that; both another DP and HDMI. Same sadness.

[raystevens73]

First thing comes to my mind is power draw between the 2 cards. Have another power supply to test it?

[smokerob79]

ok this is a easy one....disable Nvidia HDMI audio in device manager.....it causes stutters on NgreedyA GPU's......every card since the GTX460 i have had to do this to get rid of stutters.....so a 460, 560, 570ti, 680 4gb, 770 4gb, 960, 970, 1050ti, 1060, 1070, and even now a 3080 all had to have their HDMI audio turned off to get rid of stuttering for me.......

type DEVICE in windows search, when the list populates, right click DEVICE MANAGER and run as admin.....when it opens look under sounds and gaming devices.......right click Nvidia HDMI sound and select disable.....then try playing games......

good luck

[GOD RAYS ON ULTRA™]

Have you tried removing the hard drive? Those can stutter sometimes.

I would also make sure that the AMD chipset driver is installed along with windows 11.

[(YK)]

Originally posted by raystevens73:

First thing comes to my mind is power draw between the 2 cards. Have another power supply to test it?

I do, but you see, my only other PSU is a 500W one. Not sure it even handles this system in load

[(YK)]

Originally posted by smokerob79:

ok this is a easy one....disable Nvidia HDMI audio in device manager.....it causes stutters on NgreedyA GPU's......every card since the GTX460 i have had to do this to get rid of stutters.....so a 460, 560, 570ti, 680 4gb, 770 4gb, 960, 970, 1050ti, 1060, 1070, and even now a 3080 all had to have their HDMI audio turned off to get rid of stuttering for me.......

type DEVICE in windows search, when the list populates, right click DEVICE MANAGER and run as admin.....when it opens look under sounds and gaming devices.......right click Nvidia HDMI sound and select disable.....then try playing games......

good luck

Afraid it's already disabled. Been aware of it for a while now. But thanks for the tip.

[r.linder]

Any game you run off of the hard disk drive is bound to have performance issues and stutter, they were never good for gaming before but now that SSDs are standard, they're absolutely terrible for modern games that were made with SSDs in mind.
If your drives are getting full, that will also affect performance.

Your power supply is not going to be the issue because 650W is more than enough, your CPU will use as little as 50 watts while gaming and the RTX 4070 peaks around 200 watts, it's really efficient for the performance considering it's right around equal with the RTX 3080, which uses closer to 320~350 watts. Any instability caused by the power supply would lead to crashes, not just stutters.
I don't think any of your hardware is actually faulty, but if it's gonna be anything then it'd be the GPU first before anything else if it was the last thing you changed before the stutters started.

Make sure that you get any AMD chipset drivers direct from AMD and not from your motherboard manufacturer, very often the drivers from the motherboard maker are outdated or just no good, always use the ones direct from AMD.

Make sure you disable Windows' Game Mode as well as it always causes problems, including stutters, Windows tries to do a lot of things for gamers but it always ends up with problems.

[r.linder]

Originally posted by (YK):

Originally posted by raystevens73:

First thing comes to my mind is power draw between the 2 cards. Have another power supply to test it?

I do, but you see, my only other PSU is a 500W one. Not sure it even handles this system in load

500W would be enough for a quick test, the combined load of the whole system would be well within 500W because the CPU can use as little as 50W while gaming and the GPU rarely would ever pass 200W.

[raystevens73]

Just go load up a heavy taxing game for a test, you know 4k max setting and you should be fine.

[Adam Beckett]

CPU+MOBO+RAM = max 150 WATT at full load. Let's say 4070 pulls 200 or even 250WATT ... you're still in the under 500WATT range, with a 80% efficiency (400WATTS).

... I still don't think, the power draw has anything to do with in-game stutters.

To be clear:

... these stutters show up in MSI/RTSS frametime, spiking? Dipping?

[EDIT]

Try a LINUX-LIVE-Distro USB stick?!

Download and Install a Live-Distro. Boot from the USB-Drive and run the Phoronix Benchmark Test Suite and/or install/run Steam-Proton and a 3D-heavy Steam game to see if the same issue is persistent on the same hardware under Linux.

If you have no stutters with a Linux OS on the same hardware, you can rule out hardware and then 'just' blame A) Windows OS and/or B) drivers?

[r.linder]

Yeah if you do a gaming test of the same games on Linux through Proton on Steam and there's no stutters, then the source of the problem is with Windows specifically

[(YK)]

Originally posted by r.linder:

Any game you run off of the hard disk drive is bound to have performance issues and stutter, they were never good for gaming before but now that SSDs are standard, they're absolutely terrible for modern games that were made with SSDs in mind.
If your drives are getting full, that will also affect performance.

Your power supply is not going to be the issue because 650W is more than enough, your CPU will use as little as 50 watts while gaming and the RTX 4070 peaks around 200 watts, it's really efficient for the performance considering it's right around equal with the RTX 3080, which uses closer to 320~350 watts. Any instability caused by the power supply would lead to crashes, not just stutters.
I don't think any of your hardware is actually faulty, but if it's gonna be anything then it'd be the GPU first before anything else if it was the last thing you changed before the stutters started.

Make sure that you get any AMD chipset drivers direct from AMD and not from your motherboard manufacturer, very often the drivers from the motherboard maker are outdated or just no good, always use the ones direct from AMD.

Make sure you disable Windows' Game Mode as well as it always causes problems, including stutters, Windows tries to do a lot of things for gamers but it always ends up with problems.

W Game Mode's something I didn't even remember existing. As I never touched it, it was always on. With it OFF, based on the little testing I've done, I can say things improved, but no cure there

[(YK)]

Originally posted by r.linder:

Originally posted by (YK):

I do, but you see, my only other PSU is a 500W one. Not sure it even handles this system in load

500W would be enough for a quick test, the combined load of the whole system would be well within 500W because the CPU can use as little as 50W while gaming and the GPU rarely would ever pass 200W.

At the moment, I can't get my hands on it, but I guess it's worth a try to test it so I'll keep that in mind

[(YK)]

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

CPU+MOBO+RAM = max 150 WATT at full load. Let's say 4070 pulls 200 or even 250WATT ... you're still in the under 500WATT range, with a 80% efficiency (400WATTS).

... I still don't think, the power draw has anything to do with in-game stutters.

To be clear:

... these stutters show up in MSI/RTSS frametime, spiking? Dipping?

[EDIT]

Try a LINUX-LIVE-Distro USB stick?!

Download and Install a Live-Distro. Boot from the USB-Drive and run the Phoronix Benchmark Test Suite and/or install/run Steam-Proton and a 3D-heavy Steam game to see if the same issue is persistent on the same hardware under Linux.

If you have no stutters with a Linux OS on the same hardware, you can rule out hardware and then 'just' blame A) Windows OS and/or B) drivers?

Not a dip; a spike. Sometimes small, other times medium then even some big ones a little more rarely. All that at the most random moments.

Regarding Linux, I'm not the most shrewd multi OS user. A friend of mine is. I'll try to get a hold of him.

But for a while I've been thinking Windows has something to do with it; after my system was formatted, it behaved the same, that was when I allowed windows to update and at last thought it was normal again. Thought. Random stutters came back. I even tested GOD OF WAR with the absolute lowest graphics I could (DLSS ultra performance and all), capped it at 90 fps and even though I wasn't even moving, my framerate/frametime bar kept showing a good deal of instability