How to Fix FPS Drops and Stuttering in PC Games

90 FPS on the counter, but it seemed like 20. That discrepancy is really what made me think there was a serious problem, since if my frame rate had been merely low, the value would have reflected what I was actually getting.

I fired up a game on my laptop, a machine I’d been using and playing for over a year without a problem and played for dozens of hours. Nothing had suddenly changed that I could attribute. No new installs, no driver updates I recalled installing, nothing. And then one day I booted up a game and the game was stuttering every few seconds as if it was snagging.

I had a whole weekend I was convinced my hardware was dying. It wasn’t. The problem I’d run into was something most people never think to look for, and once I realised it, I kept noticing it on other people’s builds, a friend’s prebuilt that “just didn’t feel right” and my cousin’s gaming laptop that chugged in a single game but ran everything else fine.

This isn’t some haphazard or occasional to-do list of things I read once and then regurgitated. These are the exact steps I took to fix these problems myself, the order I would go through if I’d be facing this situation again tomorrow.

FPS Drop and Stuttering Are Not the Same Issue

First thing I learnt the painful way: stuttering and low FPS are nothing alike, although they do provide for similar feelings when you’re mid-game and annoyed.

Frame drops are normally indicative of a hardware bottleneck, a case where your hardware can’t do what you’re asking for – but what is stuttering? Stuttering is different. The average FPS of a game might be perfectly acceptable, but it still stutters because the frame timings are all over the place. 1 frame is 8ms, the next is 40ms and your eyes can still detect that jump even if the counter shows 60fps.

It matters because they have to be fixed different ways. If you treat it like a raw power problem, you’ll upgrade the wrong parts and that’s precisely what I almost did.

Step 1: Truly Keep Track of What’s Going on (No Making Assumptions)

My first mistake: I took a guess. I thought it was my GPU because it’s the part that people always blame.

I should’ve just got MSI Afterburner + Riva Tuner Statistics Server (they’re free together) on there first. Then you’ve got an overlay of real-time use of your GPU, CPU, VRAM, temps, and frame times when you’re actually playing.

Here’s what to look for:

If the GPU is below 90-95% usage and stutters occur there is likely something else bottlenecking it, which is often the CPU or RAM.
Your GPU is at 99-100% GPU usage The graphics card is playing to capacity, so even if you turn down settings the difference won’t be clear.
GPU or CPU thermal throttling (temp spiking towards 85-90C+) resulting in abrupt drops in frames.
Full VRAM usage your textures or resolution settings are too large for your card’s memory.

For me, I noticed GPU usage was only around 70% at the worst stutter. That was the sign. It was not the GPU that was weak, but the GPU being starved of work.

Step 2. Confirm What’s Causing the GPU to Starve

Now that you know the limits of what your GPU can do, now is a good time to double-check the offending process or processes. Sometimes other “hunger” processes may sneak in and cause unexpected load and possible performance issues.

As soon as I realised that the GPU was not being utilised to its full potential, I was redirected further up the pipeline.

Background apps were hogging the CPU. I had Chrome up with around 30 tabs (we’ve all been there), Discord open with overlay on, and some sync program crawling files in the background. Killing that all immediately bought me a sizable amount of stutter-free performance.
Background Windows updates. This one’s a bit sneaky. Windows Update is capable of hiding behind the scenes and grabbing and installing updates as you play without you ever knowing it’s happening. To prevent this, I always look through Task Manager before I get into some demanding gaming and turn off updates by going into Settings > Windows Update > Pause updates.
Old, or possibly, broken drivers from a bad install. I used Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in Safe Mode to completely remove the old Nvidia drivers before performing a clean install from Nvidia’s site. This resolved stuttering issues in two separate games that I had resigned myself to being poorly optimized.

Step 3: Mount the RAM and Storage

Part 2: Contains all the tools to troubleshoot RAM and Disks.

This part surprised me the most.

I was on 16GB of RAM, which the majority of guides said was “enough.” Which is technically correct. But I wasn’t using the full potential of my RAM, because I’d never turned on XMP (or EXPO on AMD) in my BIOS, meaning my RAM was stuck at a much slower speed than it was meant to run at. This really does impact the performance of CPU-limited titles.

Steps I took:

Restarts and goes into BIOS (mostly Delete or F2 on start up).
I found the memory settings and activated XMP Profile 1.
Saved and restarted.

That one modification took off my stuttering specifically in open world titles as the CPU is required to stream new data very frequently.

Storage also played a part. I was playing a few newer releases from my aging mechanical drive (partly lazy, partly expensive to download 100GB+ games). When I moved those games to my SSD – even an entry level SATA SSD, not even NVMe – I would see the texture streaming stutter go away almost entirely. If you’ve ever watched a game with textures popping in or stuttering when loading into a new area, that’s normally a storage issue, not a GPU issue.

You can also read:

Step 4: In-Game Settings That Actually Matter

Some graphics settings are more equal than others, and I used to just reset everything to “Medium” and cross my fingers. That’s not an efficient way to do things.

And the settings that hurt performance the most, in my experience:

Shadows – probably the most expensive FPS at an incredible cost for so little visual improvement above “Medium.”
Ray tracing / RTX – stunning, but you’ll pay through the nose in frame-time unless you’re rocking an uber graphics card and the DLSS/FSR kicks in to compensate.
View distance / draw distance – massive stutter source in open-world games because the engine loads in new territory over and over.
V-Sync – On high refresh rate monitors it can introduce input lag and some occasional stuttering. I went with G-Sync/Free Sync ( if you have that feature on your monitor ) instead of classic V-Sync, and it felt a lot more fluid.
Frame rate cap – I know, it feels backward, but capping your FPS a few frames below your max refresh rate with Riva Tuner or the in-game limiter actually increased performance for me by eliminating micro-stutter. Uncapped frames leave GPU demand to be variable.

I’d try making one change at a time, instead of all at once. Change one parameter, and play for 10min. Write down whether or not it feels different, then try the next. It’s slower, but you’ll actually know what worked instead of trying to guess.

The Usual Things People Do Wrong

Not testing temps. I was up all night adjusting graphics/video settings for a game that would hiccup every 15–20 minutes like clockwork. Turned out the case didn’t have any flow and the GPU was throttling due to temperature. A couple $25 case fans solved the problem.
Update your drivers over old versions Just letting GE or AMD do the update doesn’t always wipe the old driver version away, particularly if you’ve jumped a full version upgrade. A clean install using DDU adds fifteen minutes but has saved me in the region of a dozen black screens more than anything else on this list.
Neglect to change Windows power options. You’ve probably never thought of whether you’re running on “Balanced” (old Windows) or “High Performance” (new Windows) power mode. This might be slowing you down and you might not even know it. Settings > System > Power & Battery > Power Mode.
Ignoring the background overlays. I had all four of these running at the same time at one point without even knowing it (Discord’s overlay, Steam overlay, Xbox Game Bar, Nvidia’s overlay). They all have a little overhead, but they all combined to create noticeable stutter in demanding games.

What I Would Do Differently if I Had to Start Over

If I could go back to that frustrated evening with the “broken” GPU, I would have skipped the panic and just opened Afterburner. Fifteen minutes of monitoring usage charts would’ve helped me avoid two weeks of experimentation and a graphics card that I returned for no reason.

There’s never just one reason for a stutter. It’s often a small handful of issues, a less-than-very-current driver, ram throttling at the wrong times, some background app eating all your cpu cycles, temps running a little too high. Solve them one by one, actually measure what’s going on rather than assumed, and most fixes will cost you nothing but some patience.

And if after all that it is still stuttering? At least you will have a clear idea of what is actually under the hood and that is a much better starting point than pointing the finger of blame at that shiny new graphics card.