Yesterday I installed custom content for The Sims 4 and soon afterward noticed that my PC would freeze for about a second while playing Overwatch, then return to normal. The pauses kept happening repeatedly. After uninstalling The Sims 4, deleting the custom content, and removing its folder from Documents, the problem seemed to disappear, but it returned the next day around the same time.
Fortnite is also affected: its loading screens take much longer than usual, sometimes skipping the spawn island, and in-game textures take a long time to appear. Restarting the PC, cleaning the fans, and restarting the graphics driver did not immediately fix it, although the computer began working normally again after a few minutes.
I have about 187 GB free out of 442 GB of storage. This is my first gaming desktop, so I'm worried that the mods caused a serious problem. What could be causing these brief freezes and delayed texture loading, and what should I try to fix it?
2 Answers
Your storage space doesn’t sound critically low, since you still have roughly 187 GB available. The delayed textures and short freezes are more consistent with a shader-cache issue, corrupted system files, a background overlay, or another graphics-driver problem than with the custom content itself.
The mods probably aren’t directly responsible once the game and its folders have been removed. Try disabling overlays from apps such as Discord, recording software, or GPU utilities, then clear the NVIDIA shader cache. It’s also worth opening Command Prompt as administrator and running `sfc /scannow` to check for corrupted Windows files. Restart afterward so the changes take effect.
Thank you! The scan found corrupted files and Windows repaired them. After clearing the shader cache, Fortnite stuttered briefly while rebuilding shaders, but after a few games everything went back to normal.