Hey PCMR. I recently got a gtx 1050ti, and I'm kind of underwhelmed by the performance. I'm not even on high settings 1080p on doom and witcher 3 and I'm getting all kinds of stutters and 40-50fps.
I have a xeon 3.0 ghz quad core and 4gb ram. Can the ram be the issue? Or is it my settings? What ways can I tweak the settings in both nvidia control panel and the games to get a good balance between graphics and fps?
That RAM is what is murdering you. The stuttering is from your system hitting the virtual memory on-disk.
To answer your original question, it depends on the system build. On a sane build, usually your culprits for performance are Resolution, AA setting, draw distance, and shadows, in that order. Imbalances on your build can cause differing affects, such as not enough ram causing issues with texture sizes as an example (lower texture quality on your build, should get you less hitching). Slow cards with more memory (think 6GB 1060) can cause more issues with resolution than with texture sizes, say at 4k as an example.
For yours, right now lower texture quality and draw distance, that should alleviate a lot of your issues for the short term. But abso-fucking-lutely get more RAM in that build. Figure out what RAM your board can take and get 2x4 (8GB), 3x4 (12GB, if supported), or 2x8 (16GB) and you'll have a lot less issues.