I built this PC in 2022 and chose parts based on compatibility and availability at the time. Lately, a few games—including Final Fantasy XVI, the Oblivion remake, Expedition 33, and occasionally Sifu—have had noticeable stuttering and other performance problems. I initially wondered whether upgrading the RTX 3060 would help, but I'm not sure whether the GPU is actually the weak point or whether the problems are caused by something else.
The games were tested from my SSD rather than the hard drive. While playing, CPU usage is usually around 90–100%, GPU usage appears to be 90–100% in the NVIDIA app but only 25–30% in Task Manager, and VRAM usage is roughly 8GB out of 12GB. Temperatures stay below 90°C.
My current hardware is an Intel Core i5-9600KF, Noctua NH-D15 cooler, MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC motherboard, RTX 3060 12GB, 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, a 500GB SSD, and a 1TB hard drive. What should I check first, and would upgrading the GPU be worthwhile?
3 Answers
Before buying anything, check the individual CPU cores, GPU usage, frame times, and temperatures with a proper monitoring tool such as MSI Afterburner or HWiNFO. Task Manager can report GPU usage in a misleading way because it may be showing a different engine. If the CPU is consistently maxed while the GPU is not fully loaded, the older six-core i5 may be limiting minimum FPS and causing stutters. If both are heavily loaded, the game may simply be demanding enough that you need to lower settings or use an upscaler.
Rule out the common causes first: close Chrome and other background programs, check whether memory usage is reaching the limit, and monitor CPU and GPU temperatures and clock speeds during a stutter. Also check peripherals with unusually high polling rates and temporarily disable unnecessary RGB or hardware-control software. Since temperatures are comfortably below 90°C and the games are on the SSD, overheating and drive speed seem less likely, but memory pressure is still worth checking with only 16GB installed.
I usually leave Chrome open, so I’ll test with it closed and watch memory usage. I wasn’t aware that very high USB polling rates could contribute to stuttering, so I’ll check that too.
The RTX 3060 is still reasonable for 1080p, so a GPU upgrade is not automatically the best first move. Your 9600KF is an older six-core processor, and newer games can heavily stress it. Moving to a newer CPU platform would require a motherboard and likely new memory as well, but it could improve frame-time consistency more than replacing the graphics card alone. Increasing RAM from 16GB to 32GB is also a relatively inexpensive upgrade and can help reduce stutter when games and background applications compete for memory.
The games were installed on the SSD, and CPU usage is generally 90–100%. The NVIDIA app shows similar GPU usage, but Task Manager reports much lower GPU usage. I’ll use a dedicated monitoring tool to get a clearer picture.