How To Fix Stutter In Games - Frame Rate, Frame Time & RTSS 

Using Octavia to explain framerate consistency. Give this man a medal. Great content as always.

And the award for the most creative use of Octavia's mandachord goes to battlenonsense.

You have a talent for explaining these things to people. Great content, I'll share this video with my mates

I've been using RTSS for years. I, like yourself, have not found a better limiter. It's incredibly smooth. My only issue about it is that we need a third party application like RTSS to do this. It should be a parameter in the driver control panel, if you ask me.

you should make more vids like this. your netcode analysis are great but you should do a whole long vid on optimising windows 10 and increase framerate and reducing stutter with out lowering visual quality in games if you know what i mean

You, Sir are a Saint. I've been having stuttering/lagging problems on many of my games running on 5700XT. I serached through the internet trying to fix my issues resulting in hours of headache and disappointment. By simply playing around with limiting the frametime utterly fixed everything. Now my joy of playing video games is back. Thank you very much.

I can't believe this finally helped me figure out the stutters I've been having in games for years. That frametime graph is extremely useful for sure. Thank you for the informative video!

I just became a monthly supporter of your channel Chris. Your excellent work has done so much for the community. Hopefully a developer offers you a special position as a consultant one day. Thank you!

You literally just explained and fixed the issue I have had with PC gaming my entire life. I cannot thank you enough for this video!

Oh my GOD. Finally a fix that works!! Thank you so much, I've been trying to find a fix for my micro stutters for years.

This information is extraordinarily useful! Your channel is the only one I've seen that delves in these technical yet I understandable concepts in a way that is easy to digest and apply. Congratulations on having unique and useful content. Keep it up!

it was pretty rare to see this kind of videos on youtube, I will gladly try everything you talked about thanks!

Had to watch twice because of the gameplay distracting me, but what a great video. Truly am really happy!

A new idea for a video would be explaining scanline sync. Great job as usual.

I love the no nonsense technical approach that's distilled enough to be understandable by most.

Incredibly useful information! I had no idea that RTSS provided such a leg up as far as frametime stability, over an in engine limiter. Good to know!

I think you might have answered the question I’ve been asking for who knows how long. I just keep spending more and more money trying to achieve smooth gameplay without understanding what actually is causing the issue. Great explanation.

Great video. Would be cool to see you cover Scanline Sync. It seems like a fantastic method of covering up screen tearing which doesn't incur an input lag penalty.

Been following Battle(non)sense for a loooong time now, always top notch content. Perfect explaining of frametimes and framerate consistency for dummies as well as a nice reminder for the advanced.

Wow. I've been waiting for this video for years. My gaming experience improved tremendously because of this. Thank you!

This changes everything, how did I ever live without this lol

i used this to straighten out some fps issues came acrosse the video on accident glad i did it helped alot thanks for such help :)

This video is amazing! It wasn't until about a year ago that I acknowledge frametime. It was always so frustrating that my Alienware would mop the floor with my consoles with regards to framerate, but would always appear inconsistent even with constantly being above 60fps and vsync enabled. I never realized that the RTSS I've had installed on my PC from the start could greatly manage my frametime and give my games an even smoother, more consistent look! Thank you so much!

This helped me sooo much. Before i ran fortnite at 60 FPS, but it felt choppy and unplayable. I tired finding solutions online but none of them worked. I came by yours and it helped me tremendously. Now i dont have to worry about stutters anymore. Thank you SOOOO Much. !!!!

Great content as always. You could have added that optimizing RAM timings helps improve frametimes a lot.

Never thought about using rivatuner to cap framerate for stable frametimes. This is great!

Thanks for this, I have been aware of this stuff for sometime, but it will be nice to be able to point unbelievers to a good explanation. I was hoping to see you touch on SSync and give us some input latency results though.

A genuinely helpful video on this subject. Even if this does not work this is by far the best video to explain why stuttering happens. Thank you

Instantly added to my "favorite videos" list.

Awesome! now I have some very well explained video that I can send to my friends! =) Thanks for making this. PS: Can you research/look into Scanline sync in the future?

Thanks! Managed to get rid of my micro-stutters in Division 2 thanks to this tool and your tips!

Thank you so much for this video, this problem has been plaguing my games for such a long time, and now I just did what you said and they're all running smoother than ever

Yo @Battle(non)sense -- will you please do a video on the RTSS "Scanline Sync" feature and go over its uses and benefits for people who do not have the luxury of adaptive sync technologies? It seems you often focus on adaptive sync/g-sync use in your videos, but there are solutions for having tear-free experiences with very little input lag with v-sync OFF as well, that does not involve adaptive technologies, and many of your viewers I'm sure would benefit from knowing about this option.

you content is amazing as always 👍

You made my day, I was always wondering why my experience isn't smooth, even with a G sync monitor. The information from this video are game changing.

Nice work, i really hope you elaborate and dwell deeper on this topic. There is not much information out there about stable frametimes.

Wow I had NO IDEA RTSS would be so smooth! I used to use the in-game frame limiter but my god, APEX is running so buttery smooth now with RTSS!

Damn his voice is like silk. He could explain literally anything and i could be captivated.

This channel's content is soooooo underrated. ♥ Kudos for Warframe use case explanation too. 👍🏻

chris you are awesome, thanks. you were the reason that i bought gsync but i soon discovered its not perfect on games like cs go. and now you go to a next level and fix the problem. man i cant thank you enough

Take note that if you're cpu bound (90%-100% cpu usage) already before limiting your fps then using RTSS to limit your fps might stutter your game. This is the reason why he recommended to lower some of your settings in-game but if you can't lower your settings try capping your fps via Nvidia or AMD control panel.

Are you planing on do a Netcode test off The Division 2 Netcode ?

Thank you so fkn much! i did exactly what you did in the video and i now have a butter-smooth gameplay! you rock, man!

Now that explains a lot. Thanks for this video. Awesome as always.

How is this affecting the Future Frame Rendering option in the graphics menu of bf5? Can it still be turned on or do I have to turn it off in order to achieve those frametimes?

The RTSS Scanline Sync feature is freakin' amazing, I love it! It completely negates the need for a VRR display for me.

Thank you. Finally my BF 5 feels smoooooth. Keep up the awesome work.

This is absolute gold, you really don't know what your missing untill you use this method and now I cant go without it, games feel so much more immersive even at lower frame rates

Could you try and analyze RTSS's ScanLine Sync function, in detail? I'm using it for my 60 hz display, and it really feels almost like an inputlag-free vsync! :D Great vid, by the way

Das war mega hilfreich danke!! 😁👍

Thank you for saving my eyeballs. I’ve tried everything to get Apex running smooth and this ultimately fixed all my issues. I really appreciate you going into such great detail.

Very good Quality over Quantity Channel! Keep it going

Again no chance for Chill? This was the perfect opportunity. It doesn't add delay and limits in a range or a fixed rate. We know you did tested that a long ago, but like people said, you probably encountered a bug, even the chill's developer explained how it's supposed to work. But well, the video is very informative, thanks for your hard work.

Hey man, what do you think of Chill as a frame limiter when available ? I feel like it doesn't introduce a single frame of input lag and the frame pacing looks great on my end.

I've suscribed right now to your channel because you've this particular, clever pedagogical method of going to the point. Thanks a lot for the quality and intellectual honesty of your presentation. You make us earn one thousand of hours of checking some unintelligible others pretending experts. Best regards with all the wishes for this year.

thanks you so much you solved a question i have spent years trying to answer :)

And what if you are also recording with Replay Buffer from Shadowplay or OBS? I believe you should then up the framerate limit a bit? Great video and analysis btw.! Keep them tips and tricks coming! (-;

5:00 I like how your pc tries to open a .json file with photoshop

Was getting random frame drops down to 20-30 fps with a normal consistent 144 fps on fortnite which i had the in-game limiter set to and this completely fixed the problem, thanks my man liked & subbed!

such a underrated chennel!! great video good info! thank you

Hi Battle(non)sense or to anyone out there reading this! This really helped a lot with stable frametimes, but sadly I still get microstutters/frametime spikes when crossing certain zones or walking into new areas. Within an area I get absolutely butter smooth gameplay, but when I walk into a new area I know has the microstutter, it will evoke the microstutter. The microstutters don't happen at random and are reproducible. I think I have pretty decent hardware to run these games in the first place (5700 XT, R5 3600, 16gb 3000mhz). Is the game just poorly optimized or what? Should I get a high speed NVME ssd? Anyway, when I watch other videos on youtube crossing the same "areas", I see the exact same places evoking the stutter. So is this completely normal phenomenon?

One detail is missing. And that is the difference between a framerate capped by the CPU, or by the GPU. You can have a variable framerate whilst not having any stuttering so long as your GPU is the one that is tapped out. If the CPU becomes the bottleneck, then you get inconsistency in when drawcalls are processed and as a result stutter. Since the render engine runs on a single thread still, any processing done in a "context thread" that is not done means that frame will be delayed. This can occur before the CPU marks itself, or even a single thread, to 100%. As the wait time for that process to be finished will not show up in that core average load%. I like the idea of how Battle(non)sense tackles the idea, but not the means. He notes you should lower settings, but as stutter most commonly stems from a CPU bottleneck, you should lower settings that lower the load on the CPU. Meaning draw distance, geometry detail, real-time physics, etc. Any pixelprocessing features predominantly done on the GPU can stay on. And these can also cause the framerate to dip below the set framerate cap without causing stutter. In fact, INCREASING GPU related features can smooth out the framerate, as the GPU becomes the bottleneck and the average framerate drops (just like it would by setting max. framerate cap with RTSS). And lowering settings can, as I just demonstrated, lower pixelprocessing features and move the load more towards the CPU (as framerate increases). This is especially true when gaming on multi-core CPU's with lower overall coreclock. They can handle a lot of context threads, but the renderthread is chocked up easier due to the lower coreclock. For example Threadripper CPU's or Ryzen. Also, yes, RTSS is fucking amazing.

You are insaaaaaaaaaaane! Thank you for all of your videos. As an engineer I understand what it takes to understand and find out what is really causing a problem. Thank you, you are a real Professional!

THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH!! I was so furious with my Rocket League stuttering even when it's 250 fps now it's smooth as it can be! I love you THANKS

4:57 "Änderungsdatum" the word is so similar to the Swedish "Ändringsdatum" that's why we are a family of language.

Can you do a video on RTSS Scanline sync for us casuals without gsync or freesync panels

you are so awesome, great content and great voice. also that outro music is really nice, wish i could listen to it (i've read the description).

This video helped me immensely. Thank you for taking the time to teach us about something like this. You should make a series out of it as the information is very useful.

Can you compare scanline sync vs framerate limit for frametime pacing?

You should include the fact, that sometimes inconsistent frametime and stutter are game engine based problems, which cannot be fixed via lowering graphic settings or fps limit. Escape from tarkov for example, which has stutter caused only by the Unity game engine.

Your English has improved considerably, keep up the good work man🇺🇸.

Why do I learn that only now?! Thanks a lot Chris!

From an esports point of view, would you rather do uncapped fps for minimum input lag or constant framerate with stable frametimes ?

DO you mind making a netcode video on Hunt: Showdown?

This was so helpful and informative. Thank you!

Excellent guide Chris. I lowered some graphics settings in Battlefield V, turned on future frame rendering and capped my fps at 120fps. Runs very smooth now. Thanks!

Some things he doesn’t understand well. Rivatuner only gives every last frame rendered at the consistent times. This won’t make the delay between the frame render and the frame preciew consistent. The rendertime of the frame is always different depending on the action going on on your monitor. This frame capper only displays the last rendered frame on the consistent times. You can’t force your GPU to take a certain time to render a scene, it’s unpredictible as it’s a game where the action depends on your input.

This video is misleading. The way RTSS operates is by blocking the CPU from submitting a new frame to the GPU until a specified time interval is reached (so with a limit of 60 fps, RTSS will make the CPU wait ~16.67ms since the previous frame was submitted to the GPU to deliver a new frame). This is a very accurate method but it introduces a tiny ammount of input lag and motion judder, since what determines what is displayed in a frame is the data that is presented to the CPU, not when this data is submitted to the GPU for being rendered. In other words, the CPU creates a new frame, but RTSS delays the submission of this frame to the GPU. The way Afterburner and other overlay monitoring software calculate frame times is by measuring the delta time between GPU submissions, that's why they show a perfect flat line when using RTSS, but it's not a good representation of frame pacing. The optimal method to measure frame times is the way that software like OCAT, FrameView and CapFrameX do it. These programs show you detailed data of every single frame they capture, and the thing that interest us the most is the delta time between the start of consecutive frames (the frames being presented to the CPU). From what I can gather, RTSS is not very accurate at presenting new frames to the CPU, albeit it can improve some badly optimized games. Interestingly, Scanline Sync (a RTSS feature) is the most accurate method I've discovered, but it doesn't work well with all games and it introduces problems of its own. In order to achieve the smoothest motion possible, you should use VSYNC if you have a fixed refresh rate monitor and in-game limiters if you have a G-Sync/Freesync monitor. I encourage anyone who reads this to test it by their own.

Top notch content as always, this is excellent! Subscribed!

This man works relentlessly .. so much love man

Can you make a video about how regularly clearing standby memory improves frametimes? Since the Windows 10 Creators Update there is a bug in the OS that causes stuttering when the entire RAM is occupied by standby memory (basically automatically cached files). The difference between full and not full RAM is obvious when you make benchmarks including 1% and 0.1% minimum frametimes - especially in PUBG. However major parts of reddit still see it as placebo regardless of what numbers I present them with. Maybe a video from you would help. The tools that provide you with the needed functionality would either be emptystandbylist.exe or Intelligent standby list cleaner.

Please make a video about scanline sync

I'm actually amazed at how much this helped thank you

I had a 3700x and a 1660 TI and was getting really inconsistent frame delivery in valorant while I was trying to watch streams on my second monitor, so I turned on that frametime graph, turned down the quality till the frame rate was consistent, and then capped the frame rate with rtss a little bit below that, and now my gameplay is perfectly buttery smooth and that line is perfectly flat. I also followed his g-sync monitor guide as well since I have a variable refresh rate g-sync monitor. After that my gameplay is perfect while watching anything on my 2nd monitor as well. Thank you so much!

What about the problem with windows not eliminating the ram standby list and creating stuttering, I am not quite sure if it is called exactly that, but people came around with that in pubg where you could end up with 7/8 gb of data in the ram standby list after just 1 match making the game really stuttering. Basically the fix is to create an event in windows that frequently clean that cache or using a program that does that, anyway at least to me and other people really improved the gameplay, so I woul really love to hear what you have to say about that

Please do a video on the new Nvidia Maximum Frame Rate feature vs RTSS.

Extremely helpful video. Thank you!

Once again you have improved my gaming experience, thank you.

One question, what's the purpouse of "Scanline Sync"?

It goes far deeper than this. DPC latency, optimising Windows via disabling services, finding the best driver versions for basically everything (again reducing DPC latency), all of these things will have a major effect.

I don't usually comment on youtube videos but this is excellent work, same for some of the other content I have seen so far. Hope those subs skyrocket for you soon.

You are on the future man, TYVM! Brazil here.

Destiny 2 anticheat does not allow any programs such as RTSS or any record software to be used so my question is how is it possible to test it?

I have FPS Drops in Battlefield 5. The FPS are locked at 120 but they sometimes fall to 110 and then it stutters. If I reduce the graphics settings and the FPS locked to 100, I have the same problem. What could be the reason. CPU: i7 8700k GPU: GTX 1080ti RAM: 32GB 3200 CL 14

Wow, i just love you and your videos 👌👍 Makes totally sense and thank you^^

UR A GOD this has been messing with me for month i was abt to throw my whole setup away thank u so mutch

i use RTSS have steady frames and still have spikes, wtf

Using videogames to explain problems... Schools: wait, that's illegal

Thank you!! I have literally tried every solution but this one in the past few days. I went to the BIOS with overclocking the CPU, tried to get any performance out of my RTX2080 that I could. Deactivated shadows, lowered the graphic settings. But even games like Diablo 3 or even PIXEL GAMES were stuttering around.. Even tried compatibility mode with Windows 7 and 8.. Nothing, NOTHING helped to get rid of those short stutters and frame drops. But this.. THIS was the solution! I really, really appreciate the help!

So glad a bigger channel made a video about this most underestimated gaming tool.