Stutter Issues when running certain programs

I am running into issues where the PC is stuttering when running certain programs.

Programs that have been causing the issues for me have been anything from Destiny 2 to Photoshop.

It's not instant issues it seems to be after running the program for a while the stuttering begins and the PC freezes for a few seconds before regaining itself and picking itself back up. Even after closing the program the stuttering remains until the PC restarts.

I have checked task manager while running the programs and I don't see the PC maxing out or anything that causes me concern, but this stuttering issue just remains.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

Specs are below -
Case CORSAIR OBSIDIAN SERIESTM 500D SE CASE
Processor (CPU) Intel® CoreTM i9 Eight Core Processor i9-9900K (3.6GHz) 16MB Cache
Motherboard ASUS® ROG MAXIMUS XI HERO: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready
Memory (RAM) 32GB Corsair VENGEANCE RGB DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 16GB)
Graphics Card 11GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 Ti - HDMI, 3x DP GeForce - RTX VR Ready!
1st Storage Drive 4TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA PRO 3.5", 7200 RPM 128MB CACHE
1st M.2 SSD Drive 1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 3300MB/W)
Intel Optane Memory 32GB INTEL® OPTANE MEMORY - USE WITH MECHANICAL HDD
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply CORSAIR 850W RMx SERIESTM MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable 1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling Corsair H100x Hydro Cooler w/ PCS Ultra Quiet Fans
Thermal Paste COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND
Extra Case Fans 3x Corsair LL120 RGB LED Fan + Controller Kit
Sound Card ASUS STRIX Raid DLX 7.1 PCIe sound card
Wireless/Wired Networking ASUS PCE-AC88 AC3100 2100Mbps/5GHz, 1000Mbps/2.4GHz
USB/Thunderbolt Options 2 PORT (1 x TYPE A, 1 x TYPE C) USB 3.1 PCI-E CARD + STANDARD USB PORTS
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Are you monitoring CPU and GPU temps e.g. with something like HWinfo?

Are the programs installed on the SSD or HDD?

Is the Optane module set up for the HDD or SSD?
 
I have been using iCUE as it came installed and I haven't seen any abnormal temps really, hottest it has gotten is around 60 degree's and that was during the summer.

Programs themselves are installed on the HDD, and the optane module is set up for HDD.

I am at a bit of a loss as to what is causing it to be honest.
 

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Task Manager isn't the best tool for looking for performance issues, it's sampling intervals are too long. You're much better off using the Resource Monitor - entering resmon in the Run command box is the quickest way to start it. The counters on the section headers will give you an idea of how stressed each resource is and the lists within each section show you what processes are using each resource. Clicking on the headers within each section lets you sort on each of the columns.

I've just seen your latest response (it arrived as I was typing!) and installing programs to the HDD is not a wise move, all programs should be on the SSD, that's what it's for. That said, that alone shouldn't explain the stuttering.

It would be worth downloading memtest and running that overnight. You have a lot of RAM there and it's not impossible that an area is flaky. If that area of RAM isn't used until a program has been running for a time that might explain what you're seeing. A good memtest run (you want several iterations of the various tests) will eliminate RAM.
 
I have moved Steam & Destiny 2 Over to the SSD and used resmon monitor to get monitor the programs as I have been using them.

Still nothing stands out that seems to be causing my issues. Disc and CPU usage are both fairly low, maxing around 40%.

Looking at the memory again nothing stands out to me.

I have tried to use Memtest as well but cant seem to get it booted through my UEFI Bios.

I'm really at a loss with this, I'm not overly familiar with this aspect of tech support so any help is hugely appreciated
 

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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Memtest supports UEFI, in fact it now only supports UEFI. It is vital however that you download the correct image for the media type you're using.

It really is worth getting Memtest run because flaky RAM could be your problem..
.

Sent using Tapatalk
 
Managed to get MemTest up and running over night, showing no faults here either. it ran 4 passes with no errors.

Is it worth running the tests over multiple nights to get more of a sample?
 

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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
No that's good enough I think. Clearly it's not a RAM issue. I was important to check though. [emoji3]

Instead of using Task Manager to check resource utilisation use Resource Monitor. Enter 'resmon' into the Run box. That will give you much more detail.

Sent using Tapatalk
 
I'm not seeing anything obvious in resource monitor. Mind you I don't know what I'm exactly looking out for.
 

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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
No, there is nothing in that snapshot. What you should be looking at initially are the counters on the section headers. So CPU Usage %, Highest Active Time for disks, %Network Utilisation and Hard Faults/Sec for Memory.

With the % usage figures (CPU, Disk and Network) clearly anything close to 100% is going to be a problem. For the Memory as long as the Hard Page Fault/sec value stays 0 (and with 32GB of RAM installed it absolutely should) you don't have a RAM usage problem.

If you still get the stutter with all those values staying low then it's not a resource problem.

It's worth checking that it's not malware that's the cause, run a couple of scanners; perhaps Windows Defender and Malwarebytes.

Drivers would be next on my list. Make sure all are up to date. With your Nvidia card use DDU to remove all previous drivers and then install the latest driver for your card and OS.

You might also try starting in safe mode (which doesn't load most drivers) and see whether it will stutter in that state?
 
I am seeing hard faults when using resource monitor for the memory, it seems to fluctuate randomly with no real set pattern to it. However they are there.

Whats the best way to resolve that?
 

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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I am seeing hard faults when using resource monitor for the memory, it seems to fluctuate randomly with no real set pattern to it. However they are there.

Whats the best way to resolve that?

Some background first. Hard page faults occur because a page of memory (they are 4kB pages) that has been referenced by a process isn't in RAM, it's on the pagefile on disk and so a disk read is required to load it back into RAM. This is a slow process and is generally bad.

There are always a few regardless of how much RAM you have, it's the way Windows memory management works, but what you're seeing looks a lot more than I'd expect on that system. You need to see what process(s) are taking these page faults so expand the Memory section in Resource Monitor and click on the header that says Hard Faults/sec to sort on that column. Each time you click on the header the sort changes from descending to ascending, we want it descending so the process(s) with the highest page fault rate are at the top. What are those processes?
 
Having kept an eye on it I've seen a couple of programs spike in hard faults, but it doesn't seem to correlate with when the stuttering happens.
 

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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Memory pages end up in the pagefile (ie. paged out) for a number of reasons, chief amongst these are the following....

1. Windows memory management. When free RAM is in short supply Windows will steal active pages that are not being used and page them out to the pagefile (thus freeing-up RAM).

2. An application can flush pages deliberately to the pagefile. Applications that do this are those that process large amounts of data which they know (or suspect) isn't likely to be used again. If the application then does want that data again it has to be paged in.

3. Memory-mapped files. This is a performance technique that allows files to be edited directly in memory, edited parts of the file are paged-out to the pagefile, when the file is finally written to disk the paged-out pages must be paged-in (via hard page faults) before being written to disk.

If you look at the RAM usage in your examples, and remember you can consider Standby memory as free memory, you are not paging because of a RAM shortage. The paging you are seeing is thus application driven, either via the page flush mechanism or because it uses memory-mapped files, neither of these are under your control at all.

You can thus largely ignore these hard page faults - though they could be a cause of stuttering if the pagefile is not on your SSD. The Destiny example you have provided looks to be paging excessively to me. It would be nice to see a photoshop example too.

You should ensure that your pagefile size is 'system managed' (ignore any advice on the web to set it yourself to some particular multiple of RAM) and that it is on the fastest drive you have - that means it should be on your M.2 SSD and not on the HDD.
 
So I loaded up Photoshop and progressively the stuttering got worse and worse as the program was open to a point where my PC would freeze for 10+ seconds and this would happen repeatedly every 30 seconds or so. Pretty much making my PC unusable.

I didn't see Photoshop causing many Hard faults in my memory but my Disk usage went all over the place. All Attachments are when Photoshop has been running.

I'm starting to get concerned something is fundamentally wrong with the PC I just cannot pin point what is the issue is to attempt to fix it.

I will note the stuttering is a lot worse when using Photoshop. Pretty getting to the point when I have to give up on using the PC and restart it, after a restart and resuming Photoshop the stuttering does not take long to resume.

The PC itself is less than 3 months old. Photoshop is also installed on the SSD.
 

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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I think you can stop looking at page faults now, we've established that you're not short of RAM. I can tell that your pagefile is on the SSD from these screenshots - at least I'm pretty sure it is anyway. :)

The one screenshot there that worries me is the second one (Disk Issue 2). The disk section header shows you're moving almost 9MB/s of data to/from your disks, assuming that section is sorted on the Response Time field and that's not a huge volume, so a 12ms response time for three 'system' processes, which are almost certainly on your SSD, is pretty poor (for an SSD, it's not bad for an HDD). You'll note that most of those I/Os are caused by hard page faults (notice how the disk graph peaks with the page fault peak).

I notice also that your network peaks at the same time and the network header shows 17Mbps network I/O which is significant. What is your Internet speed like? It looks like that section is sorted on the default of Total (B/s) and Twitch seems to be by far the biggest contributor.

Can you try the same tests again but with Twitch not running at all? I know nothing of how Twitch works but I'm wondering whether the page faulting, excessive disk I/O and excessive network I/O are what's causing the stuttering.....
 
My Internet Speeds should handle it no problem. I started up Photoshop and Immediately saw the attached as well.
I'm currently running tests with Twitch Closed to see if that has any impact at all.
 

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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
It's pretty clear from those numbers that it's Photoshop (and related Adobe software) that is generating all those page faults and that's what's driving those high your disk reads/writes. The 'System' function you see in the Disk section is most likely the memory manager handling those page faults. I would think that it's these page faults that are making Photoshop stutter but I'm at a complete loss to explain why Photoshop should be behaving in this way.

I suggest you use something like Macrium Reflect (free) to image your system drive - be sure you make a Macrium boot disk so you can restore this later should you need to - and then clean install Windows from bootable media. Assuming we're talking Windows 10 allow Windows Update to install all drivers. Then install Photoshop and see whether you get the stutters then?

I can only think there is something amiss in your Windows system (or in Photoshop).....
 
So in follow up to all of this I have been having issues with the new Call of Duty that didnt happen during the beta and not initially, theye slowly crept in after a few days of playing.

Main issue I've been having is like the image output crashing. My Monitors will freeze and I have to hard reset my PC. Sound is still fine so it just seems to be a image output issue.

Second issue is that I am getting glitchy images like like the images on screen are set to a very weird Glow/RGB issue, some times its hardly noticeable. Like only certain aspects of the image are glitched out. Other times the entire screen is just gone and wrong. If I turn off the game and restart it the images go back to normal after a while.

Looking online this seems to indicate a graphics card issue, however thought I would post in here to get further opinion from people who know alot more than me.

It would also seem to line up with the fact this has been a issue that has been getting worse and worse over time, this was not a issue when I first got the PC.
 

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I think it's time for a clean reinstall of Windows. You need to establish whether these issues are software or hardware related and a clean install, allowing Windows Update to install all drivers, will give you a clean software environment. If it fails after that then it's almost certainly hardware.

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