Is your HDD leading to noticeable stuttering in Hogwarts Legacy and Sons of the Forest?
Is your HDD leading to noticeable stuttering in Hogwarts Legacy and Sons of the Forest?
I had never experienced this level of stuttering before and managed to play Red Dead 2, Elden Ring, AC Valhalla and RE Village without issues, but Hogwarts Legacy and Sons of the Forest became unplayable due to the stuttering. Whenever I move or turn the camera, it just freezes and stays frozen. God of War also had some stuttering (mainly during cutscenes) and was playable when entering a new area initially.
I’ve noticed my PC performance has dropped significantly over the past two years, but I don’t think the hard drive is failing. The hard disk monitor shows 100% performance and health, though I’m not sure why.
My HDD reaches 100% during every stutter and disk activity, especially in Hogwarts Legacy. It seems I might have reached the limit of RAM and is now relying on the slow HDD virtual memory, although RAM usage rarely goes above 95%.
I usually play at 1080p with medium settings, but lowering everything didn’t improve frame rate—sometimes it even got worse.
My system specs:
- Windows 10 64-bit
- 1060 6GB
- Ryzen 5 1600 AF
- 8GB DDR4 2400MHZ (2x4GB) Dual-channel
- HDD 1TB WD Blue (main OS) + HDD 2TB Seagate Barracuda
I don’t remember the motherboard or power supply unit, so they probably aren’t critical right now.
I’m a student in a very poor country and can’t afford major upgrades. Maybe adding a few extra RAM slots or getting a cheap SSD would help. I haven’t used an SSD before.
What seems to be the main reason for recent unplayable games? Should I upgrade to 12 or 16GB of RAM, or get an SSD finally? Can using an SSD help with the pagefile?
I tolerate minor stutters now, as they were rare before. My friends are playing these games fine—some have 8GB of RAM but all have SSDs.
The medium settings are too high for your device. Based on the game requirements, you're just above the minimum, so consider using low settings. It's recommended to use FSR 2 and set it to Performance unless you're using Ultra Performance mode.
If your FPS are acceptable and the issue only occurs when moving or turning the camera, it might be due to mouse coding not being optimal for mouse input. In such cases, lowering the mouse polling rate can help, though this is usually possible only with gaming mice.
For a gaming mouse, adjust the polling rate to 500 if it's set at 1000. If that doesn't resolve the issue, try 250. Regardless, reducing it is generally beneficial for gameplay since it's not a shooter.
Occasionally, stuttering could stem from raw mouse input being enabled or excessive sensitivity, but the polling rate is more likely the culprit. You might also try disabling in-game vsync and frame limiter, or use Nvidia Control Panel to manage them.
Even when everything is turned off and the volume is low, I still don't notice any improvement in any game. The stuttering also occurs when I just hold W or use a controller, so I don't think it's related to the mouse.
I plan to try the FSR 2 and thank you for your assistance.
PC Specifications
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This suggests a possible CPU performance problem. However, if the hard drive is spinning rapidly while playing, it might also be the cause.
Usually the page file experiences minimal activity.
If it resides on an HDD, performance will be poor.
Check the task manager/resource monitor/memory section/hard fault page rate.
If you notice anything significantly higher than zero, there’s likely a fixable issue by boosting RAM.
I might consider 8gb insufficient.
When a page fault occurs, Windows must relocate 4k of code from RAM to the page file and then fetch the needed page.
A standard seek/read/write operation on a 7200 rpm HDD could take around 30ms.
Details for a 5400 rpm HDD and larger drives are available.
While waiting, your application may freeze while you perform these actions to address a page fault.
If your page fault rate reaches 5 per second, it’s equivalent to running the CPU at 70%.
An SSD will handle page faults approximately 40 times faster.
Try replacing your RAM with a 2 x 8gb configuration.
And, using an SSD for your C drive will always speed things up.
Switching the pagefile from disk C (main OS with 5400 rpm) to disk D (storage with 7200 rpm) this morning made a big difference, turning it from completely unplayable to playable with fewer stutters. After testing the games now, I wasn’t expecting such a big improvement. Here are the test results:
Sons of the Forest:
Hard faults from 8 to 40, stutters when I hit a tree with an axe and open the inventory.
Hogwarts:
I don’t know why the GPU usage stays at 0% while playing Hogwarts and CPU usage is low. It ran much better than before.
Hard faults mostly at 10, stutters when entering new rooms.
Should an SSD help even more to reduce stuttering? Or is 16GB RAM more recommended?
Both but you remain on the lower side of the requirements. Even individuals with more advanced PCs are encountering issues because the game is extremely poorly optimized.
Certainly, I believe increasing the RAM is the most effective solution. However, could we also consider switching the C drive to an SSD as well? This would make everything feel faster. It's quite simple to transfer the C drive to an SSD, and it should only require a size that accommodates the existing data plus any future expansion plans.