I've been dealing with significant stuttering issues while gaming on my laptop, which has a GTX 1050 Mobile, i7-7700HQ, 12GB RAM, and an SSD SATA. It happens in various games like Roblox, Dirt 4, Stalker Shadow Of Chernobyl, and Arma 3. While I play, I notice drops in GPU usage with a significant increase in CPU usage, all while temperatures remain around 85°C. Could this be related to thermal throttling or a bottleneck? Also, apologies if my English isn't great for these technical discussions. I'm new to this, and here's a link to a clip showing the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff8vx8kqyu4
3 Answers
I noticed that massive stutter at 0:08 in your video too. I've had similar issues, and it often helps to play around with your NVIDIA control panel settings. Are you using Windows 10? Sometimes that can affect performance in games.
It sounds like your laptop is a bit older, possibly around 7 or 8 years. One thing you should definitely try is taking it apart to clean the heat sinks on both the GPU and CPU, then apply fresh thermal paste. It’s quite common for laptops to thermal throttle when they get too hot, which can lead to performance drops. Just be careful while doing this!
Thanks, I will try that! I'll update if I see any improvement.
Have you checked the size of your shader cache folder? If it's close to the limit you set in the NVIDIA control panel, it could be causing issues. Try increasing the limit to around 100GB or set it to unlimited; that might solve your stuttering problems.
It was on 'Default by drivers' and only 325MB. I've just switched it to 'unlimited,' so I’ll keep an eye on it!
Here's a video that might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxYgVW9Z5Is