After installing NVIDIA driver updates or rebuilding the shader cache, I get severe stuttering and occasional micro-freezes in games including Overwatch, Valorant, and Elden Ring. The games often become much smoother after several minutes of play.
My system has an Intel Core i5-14400F, an RTX 5060 Ti 8GB, an ASUS Prime B760M-A motherboard, 32GB of G.Skill DDR5, and a Kingston SNVS250G NVMe drive running Windows. I tested the memory at several speeds, including 7600, 6400, 6000, 5600 CL36, and the default 4800 MT/s.
I have already tried using DDU and reinstalling the NVIDIA driver, performing a clean Windows installation, updating the BIOS and Intel chipset/ME drivers, running SFC, lowering the RAM speed, and disabling the CPU's E-cores. None of those changes resolved the issue.
MSI Afterburner and HWiNFO show that this is not simply low average FPS. During the worst stutters, frametime spikes can exceed 100 ms, GPU utilization drops very low, and some individual CPU threads become heavily loaded even though total CPU usage remains well below 100%. In Elden Ring, FPS has fallen to roughly 17–30 during these events before returning to normal. I have also seen brief black-screen flashes where the NVIDIA driver appears to recover or restart.
Windows Task Manager occasionally reports the Kingston NVMe at 100% active time despite only about 86 KB/s of reads, 1 MB/s of writes, and roughly 22 ms response time. I am unsure whether that is normal background activity or related to the stuttering.
Does this pattern sound like expected shader compilation and cache rebuilding after a driver update, or should I suspect a defective GPU, CPU, RAM, SSD, or another hardware problem? I am trying to identify the actual cause before replacing components.
1 Answer
The stuttering during the first few minutes after a driver update or shader-cache rebuild is consistent with shader compilation. Games may compile shaders as new effects and areas are encountered, causing temporary frametime spikes even when average CPU usage looks low. It usually becomes smoother once the required shaders have been compiled and cached.
I understand that shader compilation can cause stutter, but the severe frametime spikes and occasional black-screen recovery make me unsure whether this is all that is happening. I also did not see behavior this severe with my previous, slower processor.