What causes micro-stuttering even with high fps in games?

[Steven.C]

I’m getting this weird stutter every few seconds in the game, but my FPS counter stays high. It’s like a consistent, tiny freeze that makes aiming feel awful. Has anyone else dealt with this kind of micro-stuttering and figured out what’s actually causing it?

[BenjaminJR]

I had something similar last month. FPS was fine, but every few seconds there was a tiny freeze that threw off aiming. I watched Task Manager and saw a brief CPU spike and a background service flicker on. I paused Windows Defender real time protection during a night of testing and the stutter dropped a bit, though it didn’t disappear.

[PaisleyZL]

Frame pacing can be maddening here. If you have a high refresh monitor, try enabling G-Sync or FreeSync or drop in a solid frame cap to keep GPU and display in lockstep. In my rig that change cut the micro stutters a lot.

[Andrew.D]

I even toyed with the mouse polling rate, hopped from 1000 Hz to 500 Hz and back, felt smoother for a couple of matches then it came back. Maybe placebo, maybe not, but not the whole story either.

[KevinMP]

Could it be the game is streaming assets in the background and that’s the pause you’re feeling?