Strange stutter in certain games on PC

[sicarumba]

After some help on a bit of a strange issue. It's mildly irritating but the more I try and figure out the cause the more irritating it's becoming.

This problem only seems to happen when playing one of two games : Snowrunner, and Elite Dangerous. Randomly every few minutes the game will stutter between 1 and 3 times in quick succession, for less than a second, and then carry on. I have an RGB keyboard and when the stutter happens the LEDs in the keyboard blink, much like when connecting or disconnecting a USB device, but no USB chime is heard. I even ran a USB logging tool to see if anything was dropping but nothing is logged. I've ensured all USB devices in device manager cannot be powered down by Windows. I've tried disconnecting every USB device but it still happens. There is nothing in the Windows event viewer which corresponds with the timing. I have installed the latest BIOS, the latest GPU drivers, even wiped the PC and reinstalled Windows from scratch but the issue continues. I ran a focus monitoring tool to see if something was stealing focus from the game, but it is not. The stutter can happen at any point of the game, even when idle and not receiving any input or during low-load parts such as viewing the map which excludes load/temperatures as being to blame.

Were it only happening on one game I'd assume it was the game itself, but it's happening on two. It's irksome in Snowrunner but as I play Elite Dangerous in VR it gets quite jarring when the whole display freezes. It's been happening for as long as I can remember, happens whether in fullscreen at 5760x1080 or in windowed mode at 1280x900. The full machine specs are as follows :

Intel i9-9900k (overclocked to 5GHz but still happens at default 3.6HGz)
Aorus Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (overclocked but still happens at default settings)
Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Elite m/b
Gigabyte Aorus 32Gb DDR4 RGB RAM 3200MHz (4 x 8Gb)
Aorus K7 RGB Keyboard
Aorus M5 RGB Mouse
750W PSU
Watercooled, custom loop
Windows 10 Home 64bit

Can anyone think of what could be causing this, or a way to see more detailed logs when this happens?

[sicarumba]

Digger said:

Can you run the game in windowed mode, resize & drag it & have Task Manager open at the same time & see if anything hogs the CPU for a few seconds?

Thanks for the idea, sorry I meant to say in the OP I did already do that and there is nothing which spikes the CPU or GPU when this happens.

Jinx said:

Some tips available here https://www.thewindowsclub.com/fix-high-dpc-latenc...

Thank you for the link. I followed every tip and rebooted, fired up Snowrunner but the issue still presents itself. After reading about Dynamic Tick I thought you might have been onto something as well.

[sicarumba]

Wow, lots of info to come back to. Thank you everyone for the input so far.

EmailAddress said:

Is this that thing where a game was taking screengrabs.

An update, setting, or something in the config was causing it to take hundreds and hundreds of screengrabs which were then filling up a temp file.

Interesting, not heard that one before. I'll see if I can find a massive temp file.

trashbat said:

Have a look to see if there's anything interesting in Event Viewer, particularly errors or warnings.

Yes, I did try that but there doesn't seem to be anything of note at the time of the blip.

130R said:

You might have done it already but I would remove anything to do with RGB control to eliminate that as the cause. So any software like OpenRGB, Aura, iCUE, etc. and any physical devices like commander pro.

Worth a try, though before I reinstalled everything I already removed RGBFusion because it's awful. I got it to a stage where the components were lit up how I wanted and no RGB software was running, but the issue was still present. Will try it again just to tick it off the list though.

jimmyjimjim said:

The other thing to consider, especially as you've reinstalled everything, is power. Many, many weird things happen with power glitches. Might be worth dropping in a new PSU.

PSU did cross my mind when I was listing the components for this post... Though the issue is present even at very low usage, I would expect it to get worse when all the fans and the water pump were ramped up. Good call though, power is unpredictable in its manifestation of a problem and if I run out of free options, PSU will be the first thing to replace.

trashbat said:

You could also turn off XMP or equivalent which seems to have been producing crash-to-desktop behaviours for me, reasons not yet explored.

Interesting, easy one to try after I've finished posting this

FourWheelDrift said:

Have you had 4x sticks of RAM in for a long time or is it new, did you buy them as a 4 or 2 and then 2 more?
It doesn't help checking to see that Gigabyte Aorus RAM isn't even on Gigabytes own list of supported memory on their website for this board.

Take out two sticks of RAM and try again.

Do you have MSI Afterburner to run and log what happens, to see RAM CPU and GPU usage, temps.

Yes to Afterburner. I've had it running whilst watching for the stutter and there's no noticeable peak or trough in any of the RAM, CPU or GPU usage or temperatures. I did start with 2 sticks and added 2 later, I'll be honest I don't remember if the issue started before I upgraded or not... Easy enough to remove a couple of sticks and try it again.

_-XXXX-_ said:

Wired or wireless connection? Recently had similar on kids Win 11 gaming PC, not sure if 10 is the same. I forget the exact setting but there was a "limit bandwidth" setting in windows that was set to on for certain games.

Now this one has possibly made it better, or worse; not sure yet. It's wired directly to the router using the on-board LAN port. I can find no bandwidth limit set on any individual applications, so I decided to eliminate this by disabling the network port. And since doing that, I'm yet to see any stutter. I've left Snowrunner running in the background for a couple of hours whilst working and have not seen a single flicker of the keyboard RGB. I tried updating the LAN driver and I also tried plugging in a USB3 LAN adapter, but it still stutters with the network enabled. I'll have a proper go of the game this evening with my full concentration on it and see what happens. I cannot understand how being connected to the network/internet can cause the USB to fluctuate like this but I'll report back on all the above tests in due course.

Edited to add : If I re-enable the Ethernet port and make sure Snowrunner is the active window while it's coming back, there is an almighty flurry of RGB keyboard flickering, a good 5-10 seconds burst.

Edited by sicarumba on Thursday 23 March 15:59

[sicarumba]

jimmyjimjim said:

Very odd. I've heard about some mobo chipsets having networking issues, but not in quite this fashion.

Throw a few $ at a PCI-E network card?

Not a bad idea. I did try a USB3 Ethernet adapter already but perhaps that's not different enough from the onboard Ethernet; not particularly clued up on how the bus works. Come to think of it, my RTX 2080 has a USB-C port which I believe can be used for peripherals, if so I have a USB-C Ethernet adapter I could try when I next have a couple of hours to experiment.

db10 said:

I had this the other day and it vanished when I disconnected my external monitor. Was playing on a laptop using the laptop screen and not using the monitor I normal extend the desktop on to.

Well I hope this isn't my issue because this is not a laptop and if I have to disconnect the monitors I'll be a bit disadvantaged.

EmailAddress said:

The screenshot thing was using an XBox controller with Steam, on a Windows PC to play Hogwarts Legacy.

Some of that rings true, I do use an Xbox controller with Snowrunner and it is in Steam. However I've removed the Xbox controller from my enquiries already, and don't use one at all with Elite Dangerous (still a Steam game)... not found a massive temp file yet though.

[sicarumba]

An update, as I've tried the rest of the suggestions on here now.

trashbat said:

You could also turn off XMP or equivalent which seems to have been producing crash-to-desktop behaviours for me, reasons not yet explored.

Worth a try, but still happens with XMP disabled.

FourWheelDrift said:

Take out two sticks of RAM and try again

Again worth a try, but still happens with only the original 2 sticks of RAM installed.

jimmyjimjim said:

I'll be curious to see how it goes running the network through the graphics card works, too.

Still happens with the network running through the USB-C port on the graphics card (network worked though, which was in itself quite cool)

Whoozit said:

You said the keyboard blinks when this happens. You could try changing the USB port the keyboard is plugged into? If in a 3.0 port, swap to a 2.0 port. If in the front of the puter, put in the back. If in a hub, plug it directly.

xeny said:

My experience is that if a motherboard has USB 2.0 ports then keyboard/mouse tend to give least trouble plugged in to those. In your case that seems to be the black USB ports furthest from the audio ports.

Keyboard was originally in a switching box so I could use it on a Raspberry Pi when I'm working, I moved it to an onboard USB2 port early on to try and eliminate USB from being the issue. Thanks for the idea though.

I think my next step is going to be to unplug every other network device in the house at the router, and disable Wi-Fi, so that only the gaming PC is connected to the network. Just to rule out any other device being to blame.

[sicarumba]

Doing a bit more testing and I noticed when the blip happens, the Device Manager also blinks, like it does when you add/remove something and the page refreshes. I find it strange that this sort of thing is not logged in the event viewer, unless there is a way of making it more verbose? Like a debug mode?

[sicarumba]

A small update, though I will continue to monitor this for a bit longer :

After seeing the Device Manager refresh every time the game blipped, I started taking screen shots of Device Manager to see if I could spot something disappearing/appearing... alas I could not. But I changed my search criteria in Google to include Device Manager refreshing and I stumbled across a couple of articles talking about the SSDP service. It was option 2 on this page and it was a resolution on this page

I've left the game running whilst working today and I've been seeing the blip/refresh quite reliably every 15 minutes or so, but after having disabled the SSDP service I've not seen it for over an hour. It certainly would tie in with the lack of issue when the network port is disabled, since SSDP is a network protocol.

I'll keep monitoring and provide an update once I'm confident it's fixed, or I see the blip again before that.

[sicarumba]

Ha, bit harsh. I think I can avoid any heinous crimes against my life by having the word 'Resolved' added to the subject which forces future readers to read only the first and last entries. If it is indeed resolved and not just teasing me.

[sicarumba]

Agreed. SSDs are much more affordable now, even if buying one doesn't fix your issue it'll be a night and day difference to your loading times and that can't be a bad thing. Got to be worth a try.

The last PC I had with spinning rust had a little LED showing the HDD activity, does yours? Might be able to tie the HDD access in with the stutter perhaps?

[sicarumba]

Just to wrap this up, I just played a mammoth 3 hour session of Snowrunner and didn't have a single stutter or blink of the keyboard lights so I would consider the issue to be fixed and the cause was the SSDP service. Sincere thanks to everyone who contributed.