I'm troubleshooting severe, repeated hitching and very poor 1% lows in several games on Windows 11. My system has a Ryzen 7 9700X, Radeon RX 9070 XT with driver 32.0.31041.1004, 32GB of G.Skill DDR5-6000, an ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 motherboard, and an MSI MAG A750GL 750W power supply. I play at 1440p with FreeSync enabled.
Alan Wake 2, Mortal Shell 2, The First Berserker: Khazan, PEAK, and Lies of P are affected, while Resident Evil 9, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 run normally. The affected games often begin smoothly, but after one or two hours they turn into a stuttering mess and stay that way. Lies of P was smooth until I left its hub area. Changing between windowed and fullscreen, V-Sync, or other major graphics settings can sometimes fix the problem temporarily, but the hitching usually returns within 5–15 minutes. Lowering graphics settings increases average FPS without eliminating the stutters, and limiting the frame rate to 60, 90, or 144 FPS has not helped.
Temperatures and other hardware metrics look normal. I have tried toggling HAGS, cleaning and reinstalling the graphics driver, restoring BIOS defaults, disabling EXPO, running Memtest86 and another memory stability test, checking the SSD with Samsung Magician, and logging the system with HWiNFO. I have not seen any WHEA errors. Disabling EXPO initially appeared to cause a crash while loading a save in Mortal Shell 2, and the game later continued crashing during testing. What additional diagnostics should I try, and could unstable memory or another hardware issue explain these symptoms?
2 Answers
The EXPO behavior is worth taking seriously. If a game crashes even with EXPO disabled and BIOS settings at default, the memory may still be unstable or there could be an issue with the motherboard, CPU memory controller, or a DIMM. Test each stick individually, use the recommended motherboard slots, and run a long memory test rather than relying only on a short pass. If one module fails or the problem follows a particular stick, replacing the kit would be the next step.
Since lowering settings and changing the FPS cap do not remove the hitching, this probably is not simply a GPU performance limit. Compare a clean boot with overlays, recording tools, RGB utilities, browsers, and other background software disabled. Also check whether the affected games are streaming assets from a nearly full or problematic drive, and monitor disk activity, committed memory, and hard faults while the stutters occur.
One stable game does not completely rule out memory problems. Different games stress the CPU, memory, shader compilation, and storage in different ways, so instability can appear selectively.