I've recently installed Windows 11 fresh on my system with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 4070, and 32 GB DDR5 RAM. Everything was running smoothly before, but now I'm experiencing these annoying micro-stutters while gaming, where my FPS drops from 165 to 1 for about a second. The odd part is that these stutters seem to line up perfectly with spikes in disk activity on my system drive (C:), even though my games are installed on a separate SSD/NVMe. I've disconnected my HDD, and the disk transfer is showing low rates (1-5 MB/s), but the active time spikes a lot. I've also seen some Windows logs about low virtual memory conditions and noticed that pagefile usage surges despite having plenty of physical RAM. I've updated all drivers, tried adjusting pagefile settings, and even turned off indexing and OneDrive, but nothing seems to help. Can anyone suggest what I should do to resolve these issues?
4 Answers
Make sure all your drivers are updated, especially your chipset. It might also help to let the pagefile stay on automatic instead of setting it manually; I've seen better performance that way for some users.
Unfortunately, these issues are somewhat common with Windows 11. The stuttering might be linked to how the OS handles disk activity. If you can, consider rolling back to a previous version of Windows that worked fine for you, as that might solve the problem.
Double-check your system BIOS settings too; sometimes, updates can cause changes that lead to these problems. Just back up your data before making any changes, because you don’t want to risk losing anything important.
It sounds like you've done a lot already! Have you checked the health of your drives? A failing drive can cause these spikes even if you’re not actively using it. Run some disk tests to see if there’s any indication of failure; sometimes SSDs show good health but still act up when performing under load.
Thanks for the tip! I actually updated all drivers, and I’ll set the pagefile back to automatic to see if that changes anything.