Micro-Stuttering in Valoranr & Fortnite

[zTempiiiiii]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been dealing with a very frustrating micro-stuttering issue for quite a while now and I’m honestly running out of ideas. I’m using a pretty decent system (Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5080, 32GB DDR5-6000, ASUS TUF B850-Plus WiFi, Samsung 990 Pro, Windows 11), and in general everything runs perfectly smooth — except for Valorant and Fortnite.

The stuttering behavior is very specific and not random. At the start of a session everything is completely smooth, but once I reach a certain point in gameplay (for example in the Valorant tutorial at a specific step), the stuttering suddenly begins and then persists permanently. From that moment on, I get micro-stutters every few seconds. Before that trigger, the game is perfectly fluid. After it happens, the stutter continues even if I stop moving or doing anything.

One important thing I noticed is that right when the issue starts, my system briefly ramps up — the fans spin up for about a second — and immediately after that, the stuttering begins and stays consistent.

I’ve already tried a lot of troubleshooting. I did a clean NVIDIA driver install using DDU, updated the BIOS, checked EXPO/XMP, enabled MSI mode for the GPU, confirmed that HPET is not active, and set both Windows and NVIDIA power settings to maximum performance. I also completely disabled all audio devices for testing, closed all background applications, tested different in-game settings, and toggled HAGS and Game Mode on and off. None of that solved the issue.

What was interesting is that BIOS CPU settings actually changed the behavior of the stutter. With CPPC on “Auto”, I had very regular stutters every 2–3 seconds. Switching it to “Driver” made it noticeably better — the stutters became less frequent and more random — but they were still there. Setting it to “Cache” made it worse again. So this clearly affects the problem, but doesn’t fix it completely.

LatencyMon initially showed high DPC latency involving dxgkrnl.sys and nvlddmkm.sys, but after some tweaks it’s mostly in the green, although occasional spikes still happen. CapFrameX shows very high FPS (600+) but with noticeable frametime spikes, and sometimes the GPU seems to be waiting rather than being fully utilized.

At this point it really feels like a deeper scheduling or interrupt-related issue rather than a simple performance problem. My suspicion is that it could be related to Vanguard (since it only happens in Valorant and Fortnite), GPU state switching, or something specific to Ryzen X3D core scheduling.

Has anyone experienced something similar, especially with newer Ryzen X3D CPUs and RTX 40/50 series GPUs? Or does anyone have an idea what could still cause this kind of trigger-based, persistent micro-stuttering?

I’ve been trying to fix this for months, so I’d really appreciate any insight or direction.

Thanks a lot!

[dervu]

Try this as I see you have motherboard with WiFi and bluetooth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWTZkB9rVU0