Competitive FPS Games CAUSING Micro Stutters (Valorant / CSGO)

[laurentsai]

Why are competitive fps games very choppy and it doesnt feel smooth. I've even tried lowering the resolution super low but its still unplayable, I think it has to do with my settings.

Specs:
i3 10100f
rx 580
2x8gb ddr4
Monitor : 75hz With Free Sync

For context I have heavy games like GTA V, NBA2K22, COD MW, Apex Legends and those game run very smooth and I've even streamed some of those games and everything ran well. But for some reason when I'm playing valorant the game keeps having micro stutters (sometimes my character or the aim teleports a bit and sometimes the animation for skills is skipped or cancelled??).

I have a 75hz monitor with FreeSync ON (72hz because of it)

In game setting:


Radeon Settings:


FREESYNC ON

Which settings should i change ?? Should I even have Free Sync on, Which Settings should be changed in RADEON SOFTWARE??

[tlp]

sometimes my character or the aim teleports a bit and sometimes the animation for skills is skipped or cancelled

This description sounds more like network issues than microstutter to me, are you playing on WIFI? It makes sense in my mind that the more latency sensitive competitive games would react worse to packetloss, or an otherwise poor connection, than the casual games you've listed.

Is this a persistent constant issue or does it happen only infrequently?

You can use SpeedTest (dslreports) tool to get an idea of the health of your connection a this time. It might vary depending on the current network load. Bufferbloat or packetloss are the values of interest.

You could also try updating the network interface driver. It's generally a good idea to keep all of your drivers somewhat up-to-date, and they are very often the root cause of many stutter issues.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Make sure you're measuring loaded ping jitter.

When somebody else in the same house does a Netflix, it will jitter your gameplay packets around, giving you teleport effects. If you want to minimize teleporting, buy a 2nd Internet connection that's just dedicated to your gaming PC, or find a way to use aggressive QoS prioritization with an Ethernet connection to a super high performance 4-core or 6-core multigigahert-CPU gaming router. Remember that even a 10ms packet jitter might, for example produce a 10 inch teleporting effect during movement of 1000 inches per second. And jitter can be worse than that, especially in momentary latency surges on a cheap router on a heavily loaded ISP at peak period. Like a 100ms jitter once every few seconds -- nasty teleport effects can occur from that in some games. It can also be the server's fault (try a different server), a traceroute fault (try a gaming VPN to force a different route to same server), or local congestion (node congestion, inhouse congestion, etc).

Try temporarily testing a different link (LTE, Cable, DSL, FTTH, etc). Sometimes some people got better effects from LTE than FTTH, in weird unexpected situations, but it's usually FTTH that reigns supreme in low jitter...

If you absolutely must esports on WiFi, make sure you're on 11ac or preferably 11ax, very close to router. Maybe get a 2nd dedicated router (like Quest 2 users often do for VR streaming, even from the same ISP in the same house). 11n will be very ugly teleport effects in Valorant.

Also, as a test, temporarily decouple framerate by uncapping it, and use VSYNC OFF at framerates above Hz (see advantages of frame rates above Hz). There will be ugly tearing, but microstuttering might go down, since the network packets may be interacting badly with a hard-capped low VRR frame rate (like 72Hz). If microstuttering weirdly disappears with VSYNC OFF, then buy a higher Hz monitor to eliminate the tearing/microstutter problem for very specific games whose network logic interacts badly with framerate caps.

There are a ton of factors why microstutters shows in some games and not others. Sometimes easily fixable, sometimes harder to fix.

[Gamesnic]

To everyone who replied to this about the internet - it may be plausible at first but Valorant doesn't base its movement on Internet.
If you were to lag a little bit, you would teleport one or another time, but just in XYZ movement. Tilt and Pan don't get affected by it, only if you have a Ping of over at least 300ms.
Instead, you teleport back to another position which is definetily not what you can call a microstutter. Just wanted to point that out.

Why are competitive fps games very choppy and it doesnt feel smooth. I've even tried lowering the resolution super low but its still unplayable, I think it has to do with my settings.

Specs:
i3 10100f
rx 580
2x8gb ddr4
Monitor : 75hz With Free Sync

For context I have heavy games like GTA V, NBA2K22, COD MW, Apex Legends and those game run very smooth and I've even streamed some of those games and everything ran well. But for some reason when I'm playing valorant the game keeps having micro stutters (sometimes my character or the aim teleports a bit and sometimes the animation for skills is skipped or cancelled??).

I have a 75hz monitor with FreeSync ON (72hz because of it)

In game setting:


Radeon Settings:


FREESYNC ON

Which settings should i change ?? Should I even have Free Sync on, Which Settings should be changed in RADEON SOFTWARE??

FreeSync is awesome - I have it on myself and it's gorgeous how the Tearing went into nowhere while still having very low input delay.
I think your problem rather is your settings.
Turn off all the Radeon scum first. Anti-Lag and Enhanced Sync. Both are quite useless and there's actually no point at all to leave Enhanced Sync on while using Freesync.
Make sure FreeSync is also actually enabled.
A problem I had with Valorant was my mouse's polling rate. It really did not like 1000Hz. Going down to 250Hz made it run buttery smooth.

Hope this helps.

[MentalSharps]

For context I have heavy games like GTA V, NBA2K22, COD MW, Apex Legends and those game run very smooth and I've even streamed some of those games and everything ran well. But for some reason when I'm playing valorant the game keeps having micro stutters (sometimes my character or the aim teleports a bit and sometimes the animation for skills is skipped or cancelled??).

If your connection is stable, no packetloss / ping spikes etc, then make sure you have set the Network Buffering setting in Valorant to the lowest / minimum setting (which is 7.8ms) in one of the menus.

You should try enabling the statistic graphs for frametime, ping, packetloss etc in the valorant menus and play some games just to check there are no issues

[xPrzybyLx]

I had stuttering with Apex Legends when I used "enhanced sync", so I have disabled that.

To have smooth frametimes I use RTSS.

I have found that both in-game frame-limiter and amd frame-limiter are causing inconsistent frametimes.