TLDR: Try disabling
Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling if you're experiencing frequent awful stuttering/pauses (like 2-3 seconds or longer) on Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs paired with AMD Ryzen 9000-series CPU.
To prepare for Nightreign, I figured I would play good ol' Elden Ring to brush off my skills. I've been dying to play Elden Ring on my beefy new rig (RTX 5090 + Ryzen 9800X3D) and was immediately hit with some god-awful stuttering. Frame-rate was a huge step above my old rig (RTX 3090 + i5 9600K), but this stuttering issue was something I was experiencing for the first time in a long while. I recall experiencing similar issues way back at launch, but these mostly came down to shader compilation and/or corrupted game files. So, I began the long and painful process of troubleshooting and eliminated possible sources:
- First thing I tried was verifying my game files on Steam since corrupted game files led to crashes and/or extremely long pauses in the past. No issues with verification.
- The next most obvious culprit would be shader compilation, but this was quickly ruled out since I had been playing the game for quite a while and all within the same general area of the map so the shader cache should be populated. Additionally, the stutter would happen fairly randomly while fighting enemies.
- Traversal/asset-loading stutter could have been another issue. However, the pauses would sometimes occur when standing completely still and having been an area for a while. The assets should have already been loaded into memory at this point.
- While incredibly unlikely, I also checked to see if I was resource constrained by monitoring CPU & GPU utilization. My CPU usage was extremely low, but my GPU was nearly maxed out since I'm playing at extremely high resolution (5K2K), max settings, max RT, HDR, extended LOD mods, dynamic light sources, and DLAA. Bumping down the resolution and/or disabling some mods brought my GPU util down substantially, but the stutters would still persist!
- I read some tips online suggesting that I disable Microsoft Device Association Root Enumerator, but this did not provide any relief to the issue.
- I also discovered some reports that disabling E-cores could resolve things. In my case, I'm using an AMD Ryzen CPU, so this advice was not relevant for me.
- The only things I never tried is to turn off Hyperthreading (SMT) or ReBAR in my BIOS settings. Might be worth it for others to give this a shot, but personally I don't like having to tweak BIOS settings for game troubleshooting.
Finally, I decided to disable
Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling to see if that would have any effect (PC reboot is required). To my surprise, all stuttering has ceased! This of course will not prevent stutter from the occassional traversal/asset-loading & rare shader compilation. The funny thing is that I definitely had this setting enabled on my old rig, but I guess the interactions between the RTX 3090 and i5 9600K weren't leading to any issues - keep reading below for my theory on why this interaction changes specifically with regards to RTX 40-series and 50-series cards.
Why would you ever want this setting enabled? Well, theoretically this would be useful for offloading CPU-bound tasks to the GPU. This would be great if you're running with nearly maxed out CPU utilization, but this was definitely not something that I had to worry about with my rig. Anyway, I'm guessing there's some specific task on Elden Ring's main game thread that's normally performed on the CPU and gets deferred to the GPU with this specific configuration of hardware. Additionally,
this setting needs to be enabled in order for DLSS Frame Generation to work. So, you probably don't want to leave it disabled when playing games like Black Myth: Wukong or Cyberpunk 2077 where you're wanting to use frame-gen. In the case of Elden Ring, there is no support for DLSS frame-gen (outside of mods) so there's nothing lost when this setting is disabled.
This finding is for Elden Ring, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also extended to Nightreign. Seems there's been a lot of people playing the game on beefy rigs that are experiencing similar issues.