*** Micro-stutter in games - General Discussion ***

[4K8KW10]

What is it and when does it appear.

Microstutter: What it is and how to fix it | PC Gamer

"Have you ever noticed unexpected choppiness in a game where framerates and performance otherwise seem fine? This can manifest in many ways, and benchmarks don't always tell the whole story (which is why my tests included a 97 percentile minimum fps). Most recently, I was testing The Crew 2, a game with a hard 60fps framerate cap, and short, irregular frame dips—often referred to as microstutter—are definitely present.

There are multiple potential causes for microstutter, with possible solutions that may or may not work. But let's start by first explaining microstutter.

Let me first explain that microstutter isn't the same as the stutter associated with low framerates, or in some cases massive dips in performance while a game loads new assets. (Kingdom Come: Deliverance had severe stuttering at launch, mostly due to loading new textures and models for a complex environment.) Microstutter is more subtle and often harder to measure objectively—the best tools like Nvidia's FCAT involve color tagging of each frame received by a high-end capture card.

Blur Busters has a great webpage that can help you see microstutter in action. If you swap between the 'smooth' and 'microstutter' options, it's immediately obvious which one is better—and if you have a monitor with a high refresh rate, the test supports that as well. Microstutter most often occurs when the rate of new frames doesn't quite match up to your monitor's refresh rate and vsync is enabled."

Users all over the internet report cases of micro-stutter.

Microstutter in all games (every few | NVIDIA GeForce Forums
MICROSTUTTERING in Games on POWERFULL PC - Troubleshooting - Linus Tech Tips
How Do I Fix Stuttering in My Games | HP® Tech Takes
How to Fix Micro Stuttering in Games on Windows 10 | Driver Talent (drivethelife.com)
[SOLVED] - Micro-stuttering in most of my games ? | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)

I have seen micro-stutter on quad-core setups as well: Core 2 Quad and Ryzen 5 2500U.

 

[4K8KW10]

Did you fix the stutter?

Well, on these old setups it was not possible to fix the micro-stutter.
It's always like this. Microsoft pushes the software packages, so that for older hardware it becomes ever more difficult to keep up and stay with the original performance.

You always have running services in the background that also need CPU resources.

 

[4K8KW10]

Red Dead Redemption 2 is unplayable for me because of this. Tried everything.

What configuration have you got?

 

[4K8KW10]

Gaming at 4k
10900k 4.9
3090 Strix oc
64gb 3200
NZXT Z73

What exactly have you tried? Have you tried the system with a Radeon 6800 XT or higher, or a system with a Ryzen CPU and your graphics card?

In your case, it is a mystery because the parts are top high-end.

 

[4K8KW10]

DPC latency - especially spikes caused by stuff like WiFi drivers, event timer precision or other interrupts issues, core parking and/or CPU state changes like frequency changes can all cause stutter in games though Windows 10 does solve some of that but then adds additional potential sources of its own with all the busy background tasks, etc.

That assumes your software setup is reasonably clean in the first place - a lot of people have a ton of stuff running in the background or don't close applications which might cause constant CPU, IO or GPU use, etc.

This is the reason why users should always consider at least 2 or 4 spare cores on top of what the games themselves utilise.
Because there can always be a Windows process in the background which wakes up and causes severe micro-stutter for a couple of minutes, completely ruining the gaming experience if the moment in the game is critical.

More CPU cores is always better.