I'm experiencing severe stuttering in several Unity-based games, including Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity II, Wartales, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Rogue Trader. My system has an RX 9060 XT 16GB, Ryzen 5 5600, and 32GB of RAM. Surprisingly, demanding games such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Space Marine 2, and Cyberpunk 2077 run smoothly at 1440p. Lowering the resolution, graphics quality, or frame-rate limit does not seem to help. Could Unity's asset streaming, shader compilation, frame-pacing behavior, or an interaction with my AMD setup be responsible?
2 Answers
Make sure FreeSync is actually enabled and configured correctly for the display. A 144 Hz monitor with FreeSync can sometimes feel much worse if the game’s frame rate frequently leaves the variable-refresh range or if the driver and in-game V-Sync settings conflict. Try testing with FreeSync off, then with a frame cap a few frames below 144 FPS to see whether the behavior changes.
Some people with similar AMD hardware have reduced stuttering by adjusting fan curves and carefully tuning GPU clocks and voltage. That can help if the card is bouncing between power states, but change one setting at a time and stress-test it. Since the same games worked on your previous RX 7600, a driver issue, shader-cache problem, or a compatibility issue with the newer card may be more likely than the CPU or system being too slow.
The older RX 7600 handled these games normally, while the stuttering started after upgrading the GPU. I’ll compare driver versions and test a clean driver install before changing more hardware settings.