Occasional momentary stutter in any game. Not a big deal, but unsure what's going on.

[wyattzx]

Hey guys!

 

I've had a very peculiar issue for an undetermined amount of time. It's not a huge deal to me since it's fairly infrequent, but narrowing down the root cause would give me some nice peace of mind if possible. The issue itself is vague enough though that I have little confidence I will be able to find it without combing through several solutions at once and being unsure which did it.

 

Bastion, Transistor, Borderlands 1/2, Rocket League. All of these titles have been in my rotation recently, and all of them will occasionally experience the same brief "freeze" of about half a second to one second. No micro-stuttering thereafter, no audio issues, nothing. It will simply halt, and then resume a few moments later.

 

I do regular maintenance on my PC - disk defragmenting, disk cleanup, sfc scans, regular update checks, and I restart it every day. In the background I have Discord, Steam, G Hub and Veam (my backup software) running. The backup software is scheduled for daily backups but otherwise sits idle, so I don't think it's that.

 

My specs can be found on my profile, but a quick rundown of them are as follows:

 

• CPU: Ryzen 9 3900X
• GPU: Zotac Mini GTX 1080 Ti
• RAM: 2x16GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 3200MHz (XMP enabled)
• Boot Drive: 250GB 970 Evo M.2
• Game Drive: 2TB WD Blue HDD
• Windows 10 20H1.

 

Is there something wrong I might be able to fix? Is this a quirk with Windows 10? Just the nature of HDDs? I'm not too stressed about this, but it would be cool to fix it. Thanks!

 

[Dedayog]

Could be a few things, but I would attribute it to playing games off an HDD and having textures/content loading.  You list games that can move fast and have constant content loading.

 

If it gets worse or any other issues crop up, revisit this. Otherwise I wouldn't stress about it.

[WereCat]

Are you using FullScreen mode or a Borderless/Windowed mode when playing games? Often the Windowed/Borderless modes can cause similar issues when playing games.

[xAcid9]

Try keep Task Manager running and spot if you can see any spikes when it happened. 

[Mark Kaine]

24 minutes ago, WyattZX said:

Is there something wrong I might be able to fix? Is this a quirk with Windows 10? Just the nature of HDDs? I'm not too stressed about this, but it would be cool to fix it. Thanks!

It's not really normal but can happen. 

 

Also you said your backup software sits idle but any programs can have bugs, I'd try a day or so without it (I mean you have backups even if something happens it shouldn't be too bad?) I definitely noticed macrium backup software does some stuff and costs me a few points in benchmarks for example... hence I always disable it, I don't need daily backups, I'm glad I have backups at all (my windows install is quite 'sophisticated') 

 

But sorry for rambling, besides that, my actual advice is to install ISLC from wagnardsoft... read the instructions... I think everything set to default is the best option except you set the memory flush thing to half of your actual system ram iirc. 

 

it does definitely help with occasional stutters and is indeed something with hard-drives, vram and page file if I understood it correctly (doesn't really matter to me I just know most 'random' stutters are completely gone since I'm using this software) 

 

 

EDIT: btw it's really interesting with this program you can 'check' which applications are 'problematic' some games it barely does anything - other games it'll 'clean'  the memory several hundred times within a few hours - so a definite prove (imo) that there's something wrong with the application's 'memory management' 

[GuiltySpark_]

40 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

Try keep Task Manager running and spot if you can see any spikes when it happened. 

 

This really is the best advice and probably the most useful method for tracking down what's happening. 

[Mark Kaine]

5 minutes ago, rickeo said:

 

This really is the best advice and probably the most useful method for tracking down what's happening. 

but to use this method you kinda have to play in windowed mode which by itself is problematic and can cause issues. 

 

 

[GuiltySpark_]

14 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

but to use this method you kinda have to play in windowed mode which by itself is problematic and can cause issues. 

 

 

 

Ah, yeah I guess I just assumed most people have another display for these things. Personally I have MSI Afterburners graphs up 24/7 on my second display so I'm always monitoring my statistics. 

 

Without a second display you could just alt-tab out after an issue occurs and inspect the graphs.