Does installing a new motherboard with Ryzen 7800X3D RAM cause quick pauses or frame rate jumps?
Does installing a new motherboard with Ryzen 7800X3D RAM cause quick pauses or frame rate jumps?
Hi, I recently bought a new computer to stop stutter in some games. Usually, everything runs fine, but sometimes one second of lag happens. To show you what's wrong: A game without an FPS limit ran at 120 fps normally. When I set the limit to 80 fps, things were smooth, but every few times, the frame rate dropped to 79 and a stutter happened. Even if I set it down to 60 or even 59 fps, a stutter still occurs when the number drops below 60.
I had a Ryzen processor (Ryzen 5600), a lot of memory (32gb ram, 3600 cl), and some new parts that made a difference, but this problem keeps coming back. I bought another high-end graphics card (7800x3d) with more RAM and a better motherboard (Gigabyte B650 Gaming X V2). But the lag is still there.
After swapping out all those parts again, when I played "The Last of Us Part II," I got the same problem. Even though I locked the frame rate to 80 fps sometimes, I noticed the number drop to 79 and a short pause for just a moment. It felt like the game was too slow because shaders (loading pictures) were taking up all my computer's time. I gave up trying that one.
Next, I started playing "Cyberpunk 2077." It feels exactly the same way. On high settings with DLSS turned off without Ray Tracing, the game creates about 120 fps normally. I set a frame rate limit to something like 75 fps, and my graphics card works at 60% capacity. When I run around the city, it stays smooth, but when there is an event happening (like "robbery in progress" on a map), the number of frames per second drops by one or two, and I feel laggy.
I checked with HWInfo monitoring turned on, and it showed me what was happening: When the game had to do some work, the time for each frame went up from 13 milliseconds to 15 milliseconds. That caused my frame rate to drop by a little bit, and that's when I felt stuttering.
Overall, about 95% of the game is smooth, but there are times it's low on performance (7800x3d). There is high usage sometimes, but this momentary pause... I tried changing settings in my BIOS: turning Expo off/on, Re bar on/off, PBO on/off, and Curve Optimizer on/off. Changing to the factory default settings didn't help at all either.
I also tried turning V-Sync on or off, or setting the monitor refresh rate to 120/144/240 hz, but those didn't fix it.
Here is my whole setup summary:
- Monitor: Acer 27 inch screen with 1440p resolution and 240 hertz.
- Hard Drives: System drive is a Kioxia Exceria 500 gb M.2, and the game storage has a 1 tb SSD Crucial Plus, plus an older 2 tb Hdd Seagate.
- CPU: Ryzen 7800X3D processor on top of my old parts.
- Graphics Card: Palit RTX 4070 Jetstream with driver version 566.36 installed.
- RAM: Goodram 6000 cl 30 sticks in the computer.
- CPU Cooler: Fortis 5 cooling fan that fits the processor.
- Power Supply Unit: SPC Supremo L2 550w power supply (I bought this new one about three years ago).
Is it because of my old hardware or do these games just have bad settings? What else can I try, and does it feel like this whole upgrade was a bad investment for me?
Most games slow down occasionally, but sometimes they get really bad even with the strongest PC. This makes me chase my tail here without any reason. However, when problems happen in specific games, I prefer looking at official forums, Steam pages, or Reddit posts first. It's very unlikely that your hardware is broken and more likely that it's a setting issue or not enough Windows settings (or nothing happens at all, some oddities are normal). The people on those sites know better and might just find the solution by scrolling through topics. I've had this happen many times before.
Have you tried playing games that don't shake often? Do you shake more than usual? As others said, shaking in games is okay to some degree. If you shake many times every minute or the shakes are longer than 1/5th of a second, then maybe something isn't right.
I don't get stutter problems with every game. When they do happen, it comes up at certain times and stops for only one second or so. It doesn't make the game unplayable, but it is really noticeable. I only tested TLoU 2 and Cyberpunk on new computers because those are fresh releases from newer games. With older ones like FIFA 16 and RE 6, there was no stutter at all. Cyberpunk has been around for a few years and got many patches, so I thought it didn't have any bugs or issues with optimization and was perfect to test on new hardware.
Do you see if stuttering appears when starting up? Loading items in the game uses some of your CPU power from there to help with storage. Cyberpunk is very heavy on processing power and needs a lot of things pulled from storage, so loading happens often. There are few screens because this keeps things moving smoothly.
Yes, I had a fresh install of everything: new BIOS, chipset, and drivers. I rolled back my GPU driver to version 566. Maybe TLoU 2 has this issue too? It mostly happens when moving to a new area where the game gets stuttery. But in Cyberpunk, it's not always there. Something weird happened during testing though. After running through the city for two minutes and reaching an activity spot like "robbery in progress," I saw a brief momentary frame time jump and a stutter. However, when I saved the game right next to that same spot and started again, everything was smooth: no stutter, flat frame time. It might be related to loading resources in certain areas.
NVMe storage is super fast today so things load up really quick. But sometimes when big stuff loads, the CPU priorities change for a second. The assets need to finish loading before the CPU can make more frames because they depend on those assets too. That makes it stutter while loading them. I've heard this mostly happen when your CPU cores are busy from something else, like playing a game.