Getting Stuttering in Grid Autosport

[Dave3000]

System:

i7-4930k
GTX 780Ti
32GB RAM
512GB SSD
Windows 8.1 Pro

Sometimes I get micro pausing in Grid Autosport but it's so quick that it's almost not there. Also recently I got a half-second pause during a race in career mode, sound kept playing but video paused for about half-second. The game is installed on my SSD. I have the high-res texture pack installed. I had an occasional half-second video pause issue in Grid 2 during a race as well, though it was smooth most of the time. I'm using the latest official Nvidia drivers for my video card. Is there a bottleneck in my system?

Is my motherboard damaged, contributing to the occasional half-second pauses in this game and a few other of my games, as I think I flexed my motherboard too much trying to take it out of my case and maybe broke some traces causing poor bus signals from CPU to video card? One of the stand offs, the one with the protruding end, was trapped in the motherboard's screw hole and I was having a hard time taking out my motherboard because of it. There is also deep scrape or tiny chip on the plastic inside my CPU socket, next to one of the socket pins, could that cause the half-second pauses.

 

[Dankk]

So, just to make sure, are you talking about an issue where the game will run perfectly smoothly 99% of the time, but there are rare instances where the image will freeze for a second or two (but with audio still playing) before resuming again?

I've had this issue with GRID Autosport, and also with GRID 2. I've asked other people I've played with online, and it's apparently a pretty common issue. It's rare, but when it happens, it's extremely frustrating. The freezing will last anywhere from 1 second, to a whopping 6 or 7 seconds (maybe even longer). Then, when it unfreezes, I'm suddenly a lot further behind in the race than I should be.

Must be some kind of issue in the Ego Engine that Codemasters never got around to fixing. How often do you get the issue? Do you get it in other video games too? I doubt it's a hardware issue but if you're getting issues in lots of games then who knows.

 

[Dave3000]

I have this issue with X-Plane 10, Watch Dogs, and Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands, it's very frequent in Watch Dogs though. Also when using Ultra Settings in Wolfenstein: The New Order there is a quick stutter during the intro video at the exact same spot and every time with the Ultra setting and it's not due to a lack of VRAM because during that stutter Afterburner shows 1.9GB VRAM used and I have a 3GB video card but the Windows resource monitor show that my SSD is fully loaded at that time.

 

[Dankk]

Watch Dogs is a very poorly-optimized game (like most of Ubisoft's PC titles) so I wouldn't examine that one too closely. It will run with hiccups regardless of how beefy your setup is.

Can't say I have any experience with X-Plane or PoP.

I do have Wolfenstein: The New Order, and I've played it all the way through. When you say "there is a quick stutter during the intro video", are you talking about the corporate logos that show up when you first start the game? The intro logo movies in my copy of the game stuttered like mad. It wasn't a big deal to me, because the rest of the game played totally fine. It's just the pre-rendered videos at the beginning that were being kind of funky.

The reason why your Windows Resource Monitor shows 100% disk usage is probably because it's busy loading the game from your SSD while playing those intro videos, which would also explain the stuttering. I imagine most games, when you're starting them up or you're loading a level, will probably give you 100% disk usage because it's loading such a huge amount of data from your hard drive and into RAM. That sounds normal to me.

I doubt your motherboard is damaged. I'm not an expert (and maybe someone can correct me on this); but for the most part, the internal components of your PC are mostly digital in nature - "digital" meaning "on, or off". It either works, or it doesn't. If you messed up one of the traces on your motherboard, then I imagine it will be really easy to tell, because something will be completely borked. Something will hard-crash at one point or another, or it will not work at all. Damaging one of the traces wouldn't simply make it "slower". It will completely break it.

I doubt a small chip on your CPU socket is going to hurt anything either. As long as it's not deep within one of the pin slots, it's probably fine.

Your setup looks fine to me. No bottlenecks in sight, unless there's something else missing.

Edit: Can you look at your graphics card Core Clock and Memory Clock speeds while playing one of those games, and check to see if the clock speeds are consistent? I had a driver issue a couple years back when the memory clock would rapidly fluctuate up and down really fast, causing huge micro-stuttering, or "micro pausing" as you describe it. So that would be worth examining.