Smooth stutter in some games.

coconut_pie · May 4, 2020

Heads up, I'm using a laptop.

I've got a problem with what I call smooth stutter in some games. Kinda hard to describe so here I go.

Basically the games run smooth at 45-60fps (higher even if I disable Vsync, some games have horrible tearing though so I leave it on). Then every half second the time sort of slows down and then speed up again. It does this persistently always at the same time intervals. The game runs smooth though, but time slows down in a way. This is worse than playing with a constant 25fps (believe me, I've played games at a constant 25fps and it's nicer than 60fps with slowdown).

The game it's most noticeable in is GTA-V. I'm reinstalling the game now to try and get some data using Afterburner so will post that here soon.

System specs:

Intel i5-8265u 1.6GHz-3.6GHz
Nividia MX150 2GB (I'm pretty sure it's the slower 10W model not the faster 25W model)
16GB DRR4 2400MHz SODIMM both slots being used
256GB SATA SSD
display at 1080p 60Hz

It's a Dell Inspiron 5580.

Minecraft running somewhere with medium settings also suffers from this despite easily getting >100fps.

Having checked the MSI afterburner graphs after playing, the GPU usage spikes up and down between 100% and very lower number, looking at the gpu_temp_limit graph (1 or 0) and the gpu_no_load_limit graph (also 1 and 0) they're direct opposites and coincide with the GPU usage which suggest the GPU is being throttled as soon as it hits 70C.

I'm considering thermal throttling in the GPU, when just browsing chrome or using discord it sits at 60C. When gaming or running anything intensive it tops out at 70C which I believe is the BIOS limit and pathetically low. I've tried checking 1% and 0.1% FPS lows the one other game Rolling Line (you've probably never heard of it, also horribly optimised GPU side decent on CPU) but Afterburner doesn't seem to be recording either of them.

Other changes I've made in the system are disabling control flow guard in windows defender for specific games not the whole system. I've also changed the GPU TDR_timeout to 10s rather than 2s which helped with running Star Citizen at a constant 25fps Ultra (yeah the game runs better on Ultra than Low they haven't really worked on the graphics settings) no slowdown that is apparent in other games (alas with alpha 3.9 it's slammed it down to single digit fps so I'm sitting this patch out).

Is there anything I can do?