I've been dealing with severe stuttering, inconsistent frame pacing, and sudden FPS drops in Counter-Strike 2 and League of Legends for several months. My system has a Ryzen 7 5700X3D, RTX 4060 Ti with 8GB VRAM, Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite Rev. 1.3, 32GB Corsair DDR4-3200 with XMP, an NVMe system drive, and Windows 11.
In CS2, frametime can jump from roughly 5ms to 30–50ms several times during a round. The issue also occurs offline against bots, and disconnecting Ethernet or disabling the Realtek network adapter made no difference. Offline play sometimes feels worse, with frametime around 10–12ms instead of approximately 3ms.
LatencyMon repeatedly highlights dxgkrnl.sys, nvlddmkm.sys, and Wdf01000.sys, with peak execution times around 3ms. The problem became noticeably worse after a BIOS update, although reverting to an older BIOS did not resolve it. I have already reinstalled Windows, tried BIOS changes and rollbacks, tested different graphics settings and resolutions, and experimented with HPET-related changes. I'm looking for more targeted ideas rather than the usual basic troubleshooting steps.
4 Answers
The LatencyMon results point mainly toward the graphics stack: Windows’ graphics kernel, the NVIDIA driver, and driver framework components. It may be worth testing with XMP completely disabled, even though it is running at the rated 3200 MT/s. An unstable memory configuration can sometimes show up as stuttering rather than crashes.
Check the synchronization setup rather than only the in-game settings. If your monitor supports G-Sync or Adaptive Sync, try configuring it using a proper frame cap and V-Sync combination. Also make sure the AMD chipset drivers are current. Clearing CMOS and rebuilding the BIOS settings from scratch may be worthwhile if the trouble began around a BIOS update, and the power supply should be checked for adequate capacity and stable operation.
Some people have reduced high-refresh-rate stutter by using Process Lasso to control game priority, CPU affinity, or background process behavior. It is not a guaranteed fix, but it can help determine whether another process or scheduling behavior is causing the frame spikes. Test one change at a time so you can tell what actually affects frametime consistency.
Since the issue persists at every resolution and graphics preset, it is less likely to be a simple GPU workload or VRAM limitation. A clean NVIDIA driver removal with DDU, followed by testing a few older driver versions, could help identify a driver regression. While testing, monitor GPU voltage, clock speeds, power draw, and whether the card briefly drops clocks.
I tested the system before enabling XMP and the stuttering was already present, so XMP does not seem to be the cause.