Getting stuttering in many games

[Dave3000]

By stuttering I mean half-second pauses. It happened in Grid 2, Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands, F1 Race Stars, Lego Marvel Super Heroes, and Watch Dogs (stutters frequently). I have an i7-4930k, 32GB RAM, GTX 780ti. There is no reason why my hardware should have these stutters. Only in Watch Dogs is the game I have with the most stutters but the others I mentioned they don't stutter often but still do during gameplay. I play at max settings at 1920x1080p for most of my games. I also did a reinstall of Windows 8.1 last week and that did not fix it. Is there some kind of bottleneck in my system which I doubt there is? I'm almost at the point of selling my 4930k and 780ti and buying a PS4 and doing my gaming there and buying a Mac Book Pro just for work and internet.

 

[WiseUp216]

HDD or SSD?

 

[Dave3000]

HDD or SSD?

SSD

 

[JamesV]

Have you tried different video drivers?

If that doesn't help, I'd go through my services and programs running in the background, and shut down everything not needed, and see if that helps.

Or try running a game that has issues from a HDD or another SSD.

I take it your video card isn't a rats nest of dust? Any heat issues?

 

[The Boston Dangler]

you can try running gpu-z to log vid card performance and temps, as well as task manager to chart cpu loading. look for load spikes when the stutters occur. otherwise, i suspect high temperatures.

 

[imaheadcase]

Download Speccy app, make a file and post a link to download it. Easier to know system that way to find problem area.

Stuttering is a driver issue most likely, try different drivers out. I have almost same setup as you 780TI and its fine.

 

[Dave3000]

I was playing Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands and about 2 hours into it their was a half-second stutter. I had the task manager running while playing the game and it showed that the disk transfer rate was at max at around the time of the stutter while at the other times it was minimum. CPU activity very low the whole time playing the game.

 

[Attic]

That's a good find. I'd nail down the process/s that are hammering the disk. Resource monitor is pretty good for this.

Any backup programs or antivirus running are good places to start with suspicion.

 

[Moe Zart]

It is your CPU. SSD and HDD have nothing to do with stutters, they never do, it's a myth.
But the stutters do happen when the CPU is transferring data from SSD into RAM, and the only way to reduce it is overclocking or getting a faster CPU (in your case overclocking since your CPU is as fast as they get).
CPU activity doesn't need to be high, since it is using only one thread to access data, so if the CPU usage is >16% (and you have hyperthreading turned off), then you will get these stutters.

If that doesn't work, it might be a GPU driver problem which is beyond your control, I've always had these intermittent stutter problems with my 650ti; but all my stutters went away when I moved to AMD (only the GPU, never buy an AMD CPU for gaming).

 

[styrafoam]

I have seen antivirus programs do this also, but it is usually at more frequent intervals rather than after 2 hours of playing. Try uninstalling your antivirus,rebooting, and then play any games which performed poorly.

 

[Dave3000]

I was running Valley benchmark and it always stutters at certain points and Resource Monitor shows high disk activity at the time of the stutter. I'm using Windows 8.1 and it has built-in antivirus capability and I don't disable it. I was playing Prince of Persia today for 3 hours and it didn't stutter this time. I don't understand why I would get a stutter in a 6-core CPU when they games I'm playing don't use more than 4 cores and I have 2 cores available for background activities. Also wouldn't overclocking the CPU just make the stutter quicker, so instead of a .5 second it would be .4 second stutter if it was because my CPU was the bottleneck?

 

[Moe Zart]

Also wouldn't overclocking the CPU just make the stutter quicker, so instead of a .5 second it would be .4 second stutter if it was because my CPU was the bottleneck?

Perhaps, or maybe it will reduce them completely, or maybe it won't help at all. You can't know these things without trying it yourself. Trust me on this, I've struggled with these split-second stutters for ages and with many different components, there are rarely any answers on the internet.
For the time being just try everything possible, one at a time:
1- Go to Nvidia Control panel and set the Max Pre-Rendred frames to "1".
2- Turn off a few CPU cores, first 2, then 4.
3- Try to unpark your CPU (google it).
4- Finally try to overclock it.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

your problem doesn't originate from the cpu. you have more than enough cpu horsepower and ram to run any game in existence. if the high disk activity is the cause, then it's either in the storage system (raid controller, ssd, etc) or software.

i disagree with moe zart - disk caching can adversely affect framerate, regardless of cpu or ram. disabling disk caching will often cause a game to fail all together, so that isn't a viable option.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Another thing to check is how much ram you have available when running the game. If you are running out of ram then your system could be disk caching which could cause what you are describing.

 

[xantub]

just for kicks and giggles, check the event viewer to see if there's anything funky going on (both System and Applications logs).

 

[AFurryReptile]

- Try updating video card drivers (obvious, I know)
- Are you overclocking? Monitor temps. Maybe try reverting to stock settings.
- Try disabling other processes to see if it helps (antivirus, disk encryption, backup utilities, etc)

I actually had a similar-sounding issue with Windows 7, and I fixed it by disabling a Windows feature called "Core Parking". Basically, core parking throttles your CPU cores down when they are not in use. Every time this happened I would get hiccups in my games. Disabling it fixed my problem entirely. Be careful. YMMV.