I'm experiencing frequent stutters and generally poor performance at 1080p, but I can't figure out what is causing them. My system has an Intel i5-13400F, an RTX 5070 Ti, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory, a 1TB ADATA GAMMIX M.2 SSD, and a 2TB WD SN7100 SSD. Both the CPU and GPU usually show relatively low overall usage—roughly 27–30% for some readings and 40–50% for others—so I'm unsure where the bottleneck is. I'm not very experienced with troubleshooting PCs. Could the memory, storage, drivers, temperatures, or another setting be responsible?
1 Answer
16GB of RAM can be a limiting factor in newer games, especially if you have browsers or other programs open. When memory fills up, Windows may start using the page file, which can produce stutters even if some memory still appears available. Check total RAM usage, committed memory, and disk activity while the stutters happen. Upgrading to 32GB could help, but it is worth confirming the cause first. Also check temperatures, enable the memory's XMP profile, and monitor per-core CPU usage and frame-time graphs rather than relying only on overall CPU and GPU percentages.
Could 16GB really cause stuttering if Task Manager still shows some memory available? I was already having the problem before the memory was completely full.