The stutter has begun!

Yanayaya

Yanayaya

Yanayaya

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Aberdeen
So, recently I've noticed my PC stuttering when gaming, these are freezes in the game that can last anywhere from a millisecond to 30 seconds (in the worst cases). I've noticed this is now happening more and more and I've been trying to capture this occurrence to find out what's causing it.

Full disclosure: My hardware is quite dated now going on 9 years or so and I get the feeling that a refresh/upgrade may be on the cards but before I rush out and start throwing money at things, I want to be sure I understand what's going wrong and I'd like to get to the bottom of this problem.
Click to expand...

I mainly play Destiny 2 and previously Overwatch, Overwatch never stuttered even at max settings but Destiny 2 seems to stutter more and more. Is it the game itself? I'm unsure. Anyway, I was recently streaming the game and the stutters were plentiful and so I thought I'd upload and share the video to help demonstrate what's going on. I have to admit, they appear worse on my screen than what's captured in the stream, but I'm sure you can see just how frustrating this becomes.

Before I go any further here is my current spec:
  • CPU: Core i5 3570K Ivy Bridge (1155LGA) 3.40GHz
  • RAM: GeIL EVO Leggera 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000C11 2133MHz Dual Channel
  • MOBO: Gigabyte Z77X-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
  • PSU: Corsair TX 650W ATX SLi Compliant Power Supply
  • GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 "Founders Edition" 8192MB GDDR5X
  • HDD: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
The video of my last game is currently here: https://youtu.be/kUjIbImvOJ8 I have gone through and put together some timestamps where you can see the stutter but, generally, it stutters for the entire mission if I'm honest.

I tried monitoring CPU and GPU temps and they are all ok, even when I push the game really hard (lots of clutter and lots of enemies), the usage percentage is around the 60% mark for both. My RAM sits at around 80% utilization and can reach around 91% sometimes. To combat the amount of RAM being hogged by Windows 10 I added a ram cache dump scheduled task that triggers every 5 minutes. Out of everything I have monitored the RAM is the only thing I'd say was a potential suspect given that it's only 8GB however, even with stuttering I can see from monitoring that nothing peaks or maxes out, which makes this more confusing.

Has anyone ever experienced this before, is an upgrade now due, or is it possible Destiny 2 is just not playing well with my setup? Any help would be appreciated.

Timestamps for stutter are:
  • 05:30
  • 05:44
  • 12:17
  • 15:59 -> 16:10
  • 16:38 -> 16.47
Link: https://youtu.be/kUjIbImvOJ8
 
Check event viewer in case the graphics driver is timing out and restarting. RAM optimisation processes are probably doing more harm than good when gaming.

You might want to look at tweaking virtual memory settings as well.
 
Yanayaya said:
the RAM is the only thing I'd say was a potential suspect given that it's only 8GB however, even with stuttering I can see from monitoring that nothing peaks or maxes out, which makes this more confusing
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have you looked at page file and disk usage? Because OS swap to disk as RAM usage creeps up would be my first guess. Even with SSD that is not a quick thing.
Second, third and fourth guess would still be disk/IO related. Maybe textures are loading from disk to GPU
 
I play destiny 2, and I know what gun you were after, lol, so I have played that map and there is no stutter at all. It is not the game.

To me the length of stutters indicates a process is slow -either Windows is doing something or you are loading something from disk and or memory. That you have a 1080 means to me means that you are either running out of RAM so having to load in from disk or Windows is up to something. I would try to run Task Manager and MSI Afterburner to graph events and pop out of the game to have a look after a lag to see what is glitching.
 
At minimum I’d upgrade to 16GB and make sure anything you’re playing is on an SSD.

In reality a full Motherboard, CPU and RAM upgrade is the best option going forward. MSI B450 Tomahawk, Ryzen 3600/5600x and 16GB 3200/3600MHz RAM.

Might also be worth checking you don’t have an active desktop wallpaper changer active as this has been known to cause stutters.
 
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