Annoying skip/hang, no RGB running, SYNC FAILURE

[drewyfive]

Thank you so much for this site! I've been dealing with an annoying hang/skip for a while now and the Motion Test tools here and this forum gives me hope there is a solution .

The Problem:
My computer visuals skip fairly reliably from what I can discern about 3 times per second. It doesn't matter what application or game I have open; it's universal to all graphics rendered by Windows. This makes all motion in videos, games, etc "hop" or "pop" over the skipped frames. One really good way I can see the effect is a YouTube video of the old school DVD logo bouncing . The angled logo motion is not smooth; it "hops" as is moves diagonally.

I previously had a variety of pc component software installed; Armoury Crate, iCUE, L-Connect, etc. But having found these forums I have uninstalled *all* of them. Very little is actually running on my PC, at least based on what I can see in Task Manager. And yet, the issue persists. It's so annoying!

I'm running the Animation TIming Deviation test and it *seems* to be showing the frame skips at pretty regular intervals:

Screenshot 2024-11-28 222122.png (60.94 KiB) Viewed 8896 times

Screenshot 2024-11-28 233734.png (62.14 KiB) Viewed 8896 times

The second image shows that the skips(?) are on average about 33ms "tall", whatever that means. I don't fully understand the graph, but it does seem like they're happening at regular intervals. I even put the DVD animation in a window and overlayed it to the timing graph, and as best I could tell the hops lined up with when the red lines were being generated on the deviation chart. Naturally, I also get the big red "SYNC FAILURE Unable to VSYNC" box.

Again, none of my RGB software is running but the issue is still happening. What should I investigate next? Motherboard configution? Bad RAM or PSU? I'm really at a loss here as to what to do. Thanks!

[RealNC]

Maybe it's the browser? Try a different one.

[synthMaelstrom]

Some hardware sensor monitoring software can be the reason for this, I've seen FanControl do that when it's polling an Nvidia GPU via LHM and not NVapiWrapper. Since it's 3 times a second like clockwork, then it's only logical to assume something is happening every ~333ms? Maybe some hardware monitor app's polling rate is set at 300ms?

I myself have an issue where every 6 seconds, like clockwork, there is a 2ms spike on the graph (which is enough to cause stutter and show a yellow warning). So far I've tried 5 different driver versions (w/ DDU), reinstalling Windows with MediaCreationTool (keeping both files and programs), closing all apps and killing as many processes as I could, different browsers, disabling network connections, unplugging peripherals, moving from fTPM to dTPM as well as disabling TPM entirely.

[Chief Blur Buster]

I myself have an issue where every 6 seconds, like clockwork, there is a 2ms spike on the graph (which is enough to cause stutter and show a yellow warning). So far I've tried 5 different driver versions (w/ DDU), reinstalling Windows with MediaCreationTool (keeping both files and programs), closing all apps and killing as many processes as I could, different browsers, disabling network connections, unplugging peripherals, moving from fTPM to dTPM as well as disabling TPM entirely.

Do you see the 2ms spikes in your game?

Only 2ms frametime spikes every 6 seconds in a browser is still pretty good, relatively speaking.

I was thinking they may simply be the browsers' own internal garbage-collection routine causing the spikes. But if they are identically synchronized in multiple concurrently running browsers (including Firefox), then it could be the system rather than the browser itself. Even Windows 11 runs some housekeeping stuff every now and then.

[synthMaelstrom]

Do you see the 2ms spikes in your game?

Not quite, but I do notice tiny stutters every now and again, which, frankly, could be anything.

Only 2ms frametime spikes every 6 seconds in a browser is still pretty good, relatively speaking.

I was thinking they may simply be the browsers' own internal garbage-collection routine causing the spikes.

The issue persists across the three browsers I've tested: Vivaldi (my primary), Edge, and Chrome.

But if they are identically synchronized in multiple concurrently running browsers (including Firefox), then it could be the system rather than the browser itself. Even Windows 11 runs some housekeeping stuff every now and then.

I've even reinstalled Win 10 from scratch (three times with different variables), with the same results, or lack thereof. I ended up upgrading a Win 10 installation to Win 11 and it didn't resolve it.


The oddest thing ever is that if I change the speed from the default to any other, the stutter is delayed by 18 seconds instead of 6 and becomes three times as powerful (the warning goes red citing 11+ stutters), with FPS dipping from 310 to ~265 that one time, then it resumes as usual with dips from 310 to ~305 roughly every six seconds. To add on top of that, if I simply disable the Pursuit Camera Sync Track, the test is flawless at any speed.

I've benchmarked my GPU's 2D performance with Passmark (I used to have issues with 2D after a botched driver upgrade one time where the card performed substantially worse than an iGPU in 2D workloads, which affected Apex Legends in a big way) and it is better than ever...

By the way, thanks for responding, Chief!