Are your games stuttering lately?

I've been battling with stuttering in games for months and really feel defeated over it. I just wanted to know if many others have been suffering with the same issue.

Basically every game stutters and hitches and BF1 is one of the worst. It happens when the standby memory cache eats up all of the free memory. Clearing it seems to reduces the frequency and intensity of the stuttering.

Video example of the stutters (link starts at 1:56, just before a few obvious frametime spikes)

It stutters with frametime spikes in the first half of the video but when I clear the standby memory (2:21) it seems to improve though not resolve. From the MSI afterburner graph you can see the frametime spikes are less frequent and intense than before in the rest of the video (most of the frametime spikes afterwards seem to be from the spawn screen rather than gameplay). I should note that the GPU usage in this video is low because the game is in windowed 720p to make it easier to place monitoring tools next to it. I normally play at 1440p where the usage is usually 100% but still the same stutter (another video example at fullscreen 1440p)

I've had this issue for almost 9 months but can't seem to solve it. Clearing standby helps alleviate the stuttering but it still remains and returns pretty quickly. It's worse the longer the PC has been running and in this video my PC was booted for less than an hour.

I've read pretty much every post in the Nvidia stuttering thread but haven't really heard anything official. I originally found the standby clear suggestion here

Have tried all the usual troubleshooting steps like reinstall windows/drivers, default settings, no 3rd party apps etc but can't seem to resolve the stuttering. Some games are worse than others, even different maps in BF1 have varying frequency of stutter (Amiens being the worst offender).

I just wondered if any of you were also having these issues. I just felt like having a bit of a moan since the stuttering has been sucking the enjoyment out of games for me. The majority of users seem fine, so I'm really curious as to what is causing this issue. Oddly games ran fine on my old 290X but since switching to a GTX 1080 I've been struggling with this issue.

Thanks for reading.

On a side note, I orignally posted this on the Nvidia subreddit but the moderators removed it.

Edit: Wanted to test another game which had a built in benchmarking tool to compare results. Tested Far Cry 5 before and after clearing the standby memory.

Before: https://i.imgur.com/KmtYphX.jpg

After: https://imgur.com/N0MjrCf.jpg

Video link

Before clearing the standby memory there is 3 significant frametime spikes during the benchmark. After clearing there is none. The frametimes are still not great, but at least the huge spikes are gone.

Tested with maximum settings at 720p windowed with 2.0 resolution scale.

Edit 2: To expand with a few more details.

• The standby cache can grow to large amounts throughout the day. The longer your PC is on the more likely it is to be large and cause problems. The more RAM you have the longer you can use your PC without this issue. If your PC has several hours of uptime and you have used an range of applications, loading a game can trigger these stutters even if you close other background processes. The more applications I use throughout the day (especially RAM heavy like Virtualbox), the larger this cache becomes and more quickly I experience stutter in games, even when these applications are closed during gaming. I know having cache is normal (unused RAM is wasted RAM) but this leads to the next point.

• It seems that when the game is forced to overwrite standby memory is when the stutter occurs. The cache does fluctuate in size, but when their is low free memory the stutters are severe. Standby memory is not necessarily a problem, providing their is enough free memory. Perhaps their is an issue with how Windows overwrites the memory, but I am only speculating. Performance suffers if it has to overwrite.

• The contents of the standby memory are mapped files which are often unnecessary. For example, if I played Far Cry 5 in the morning but Battlefield 6 hours later, their will still be large 500MB+ files in the standby cache from Far Cry, despite their being 0 free memory and severe stuttering in Battlefield. Additionally, the same behavior occurs if I watch a media file. It will often be held in the standby cache hours later even when there is no free memory and severe stutter. Removing these improve frametimes considerably.

I am unsure how many others this affects, or even if I'm just barking up the wrong tree, but there have been a few threads with users claiming improvements in stutter from clearing the standby memory. From my testing I have also seen improvements in frametimes by clearing the standby cache.

Final edit: An easy way for me to reproduce this issue is when scanning with Malwarebytes the standby memory rapidly fills and causes issues. When standby memory has eaten all free memory, games stutter. Again clearing the standby list resolves this issue. If I close Malwarebytes the contents it scanned remain in the standby memory ready to cause problems with other applications most noticeably games resulting in frequent frametime spikes (is the latency to overwrite standby memory higher than intended?). Just to clarify, the stutter persists when Malwarebytes is uninstalled however it is an easy way to cause standby memory to eat all free memory in less than a minute. Unless removed manually (or replaced by another process when there is zero free memory) the size of standby memory doesn't seem to shrink.

TL:DR: Games stutter when there is zero free memory and the game is forced to overwrite standby memory. This results in large frametime spikes which are measurable using MSI Afterburner. You can check this by loading 'Resource Monitor' when you're stuttering. If your stuttering improves after clearing standby memory with a tool like RAMMap, you could be suffering from this issue. I am unsure what is causing this issue or why it only affects some users.