What causes frame time spikes and stutter in a competitive shooter?

[EmilyZW]

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. It feels like a stutter even though my average FPS counter looks fine, and I’m not sure if this is a driver issue, a Windows background process, or something else entirely.

[Gary.T]

I’ve run into that too. My average FPS stayed decent but the frame times would spike during scrums, which felt like stutter. I tried capping at 144, turning off V sync, and switching from fullscreen to borderless to see if it helped.

[JustinRT]

I started cutting background noise too. I turned off Windows game bar, paused Windows Defender real time protection during long sessions, and killed a couple of low priority tasks. The stutter still came back, so I started wondering if it’s more likely a driver issue.

[AvaVH]

Sometimes the spike lines up with a DPC latency spike in task manager, so I’ve unplugged a flaky USB device and changed the power plan to balanced with minimum CPU state up a notch. It helped a night or two but not consistently.

[Kyle_M]

Do you think the problem is real or is the monitoring tool exaggerating what you’re feeling in game?