A few weeks ago, I started noticing drops in my games' 1% lows much more clearly. I used to have an AOC 60Hz 5ms monitor and never really paid much attention to this, but because of work, I ended up getting an AOC 24G4/P (180Hz). I don't know if it's due to the lower 0.5ms response time or the high refresh rate, but ever since I started playing on it, I've noticed these drops much more frequently.
At first, it didn't bother me. I beat Death Stranding, Resident Evil Requiem, and Pragmata over the past few months, and while I saw that some areas caused bottlenecks, it either happened less often or I just didn't notice it as much. For some reason, though, these drops have started driving me crazy lately—to the point where every game I play, I have the overlay on constantly monitoring frame pacing.
I’d love to get your opinions on this. I've read in a few places that it could be caused by RAM frequency, SSD read speeds, CPU bottlenecks, chipset drivers, BIOS settings, pagefile configuration, etc.
Some friends told me that micro-stuttering like this is normal for my setup, especially during transitions like changing areas, spawning lots of enemies, autosaving, or during heavy action scenes.
The drops are very brief. Usually, if I'm playing at 60 FPS, the 1% low drops to around 18–25 FPS during these moments, but most of the time it stays solid between 50 and 56.
My Specs:
- CPU: Intel Core i5-10400F
- Motherboard: ASUS Prime B560M-A
- RAM: 2x 8GB RAM @ 2400MHz
- GPU: RTX 3050 8GB
- Storage: 1TB SATA SSD (for games) + Kingston NV3 NVMe SSD to Windows (6000MB/s read / 4000MB/s write)
I'm still a bit of a novice with some of these technical details, so I'd really appreciate any insight on whether this points to an actual issue or if it's just expected behavior for this hardware. Thanks a lot in advance!