What’s causing frame time spikes during team fights in a 144 FPS shooter?

[Camila_W]

I’ve been trying to get a stable 144 FPS in the new competitive shooter I’m playing, but my frame times keep spiking during intense team fights no matter what settings I use. I’m not sure if this is a CPU bottleneck or something else, since my GPU usage actually drops when the stutter happens.

[MatthewID]

I went through something similar trying for 144 here. The frame times would spike right when the team fights heated up and the GPU usage would drop, so it didn’t feel like a pure GPU load issue. I started with the basics: exclusive fullscreen, a hard cap at 144, and turning off V-Sync. Then I cleaned up background stuff—Discord overlay off, antivirus scans paused, Windows power plan set to High Performance. A driver clean reinstall after a fresh Windows boot didn’t hurt either. The spikes still come and go, but the overall smoothness felt steadier when I kept the background noise down.

[GregoryH]

Then I tried dialing down the visuals a notch and disabling RT shadows, not because I want downgraded visuals but because I wanted to rule out the GPU being pushed hard in a few micro-bursts. The frame time spikes still showed up during crush moments, even though the GPU was underused at those moments. I checked temps and clocks; nothing overheats, but I did notice the CPU cores sitting around 50–70% and the frame timer still jumping. It felt like something else was grabbing a core for a moment.

[ElizabethFC]

Could it be the engine or how the game threads are scheduled on my CPU rather than a straight bottleneck? I tried watching with a frame-time overlay and it mostly looks like a few frames repeating; there isn’t a clean GPU stall that I can pin the issue on. I did a quick test with no overlay and a wired connection, and the stutter persisted in big fights. Is this something others hit that isn’t hardware but how the game handles loads?

[Jonathan_M]

Also I kept thinking about the monitor side stuff. I swapped between 144 and 120 to see if the rhythm changed, turned off adaptive sync for a day and just left no sync, and it honestly felt the same in the moment of chaos. The stutter still hit right as the fight erupts. I know that’s not a neat answer, but it’s how it kind of felt in practice, like the problem wasn’t a clean thing I could fix with a checkbox.