Micro-stuttering in games

Micro-stuttering in games appears to be a hot topic, with many claims and counter claims all over discussion threads on the internet, including on gaming forums and other public discussion sites.

In this article I'll discuss some of the methods that can be used to attempt to address this issue. By no means is it an exhaustive list, and there is no guarantee of it even solving your problem. All you can do is try these methods and see if it works for you. Windows power management, along with some other built in protocols seems to be impacting user's PC performance, and in some cases is putting USB devices to sleep and parking CPU cores, all in the name of "energy saving" directives. (Thanks to EU). I will show a way of making sure your PC is running at peak performance, and that USB devices will no longer be powered down and put to "sleep" as well as a few other ways that might mitigate stutters.

Windows has several "power plans", designed to optimise the computer for the tasks that you are doing. For most users, a "balanced" power plan is more than suitable. However, for users wanting to get the most out of their PC, you want to squeeze every ounce of juice out of your machine, and not have it powering down CPU cores or having peripherals such as flight sticks, rudder pedals and throttles being shut down in the name of "energy saving".

Some users have discovered that shutting down Windows Power Services helps prevent this, but this runs the risk of blue screen events and even complete PC shutdown, due to it being a critical process of the Operating System. https://www.coretechnologies.com/blog/windows-services/power/

How to unlock your PC's capabilities without shutting down critical Windows services? Follow the steps below.

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STEP 1 - POWER MANAGEMENT

A much better way to unlock the power of your beastly gaming PC is to enable the correct power plan in your PC's Power management options. Some PC's don't show the correct performance profile by default, so the first thing to do is open your PC's Control Panel, and navigate to "Power Options". In your power options, you may be confronted by a screen such as the one below.

If you are, then click "power options" in the path bar at the top of the window. This will take you to a screen like the one below.

What you're looking for here is "Ultimate Performance". This is the power plan that prevents windows parking (putting to sleep) CPU cores. Even the high performance power plan will still park CPU cores. This power plan is recommended for high end PC builds, which if you are gaming, is what you should have.

If your Power Options does not show "Ultimate Performance", then fret not. It is still in your Windows OS, but just hidden by default. We have to activate it.

Press your Windows Key or click the Windows Start button. Type "cmd"and it will show command prompt (system). Right click and run as administrator (essential) and a command prompt will open. Copy the following text and paste it in to the command line (CTRL V). powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61

Hit enter, and once done and the windows\system32> prompt is shown again, close down the command prompt window, close any other windows and restart your PC. Once it reboots, open Control Panel and go back into Power Options. You should see the "Ultimate Performance" power plan. Click on it to select it, and it will be activated.

Next you should configure the power plan. To the right of the power plan, choose "change plan settings". Adjust "Turn off the display" and "Put the computer to sleep" settings to "never". Click "save changes", then click "Change advanced power settings".

In the advanced settings window, you will see several options which you can configure. Clicking the "+" next to each category allows the tree to expand and allow you to configure options. I have mine set in the following ways.

Once you are done, do not forget to click APPLY in the bottom corner and then click OK.

That's one part out of the way, you have now configured Windows to run your PC at Ultimate performance levels.

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STEP 2 - Windows Security Settings

Next we move on to another Windows setting. This time it's a Windows Security setting called Control Flow Guard in Exploit Protection settings. Exploit Protection is a built-in feature that helps safeguard your device from malware and cyberattacks by applying various exploit mitigation techniques. Since the games we play and the various programs we use are considered safe, we can disable exploit protection settings on a per program basis, meaning we are not turning off exploit protection settings system wide, only for the games/programs we consider safe.

Some posters on discussion threads have claimed it's only a placebo effect, but several users have claimed it eliminates the micro stuttering they once had.

Press Windows Key or click Start. Type "settings" and click on it. You'll get a screen like the one below..

Click on "Update and Security", and then "Windows Security" in the left side menu. Under the header in the main window, click "open windows security" and choose "app and browser control" in the left menu. Under Exploit Protection, click "exploit protection settings" and then "App and Browser Control".

Selecting App and Browser Control will look like this...

The first thing to do is click program settings. This will show a list of programs on your PC that has custom defined settings for exploit protection.

We are going to add the executable of your game and turn off Control Flow Guard.

First click the + sign next to add program to customise, then choose exact file path. You will then get a pop-up window of your PC's file broswer, where you will have to navigate to and choose the executable of your game. For the purpose of this article, I will choose my DCS game. For steam users or other steam games, your game's executable file will be in your Steamapps/common folder.

(You can also do this for other games where you might have micro-stuttering issues.)

Once you have found the relevent file, click open you will now see a new window ...

Navigate to Control Flow Guard, click "override system settings and then click the slider to turn it off. Then click apply. Agree to any popup asking you to make changes. Then you are done with methods to try to stop micro-stuttering

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Do you remember I said at the beginning of the article that windows also has settings which shut down your USB devices to save energy?

In this section, we will taking a look at that. One of the settings you adjusted earlier in Power Management - USB Selective Suspend Setting is the first to adjust, so we have already completed one part of this step.

Now we head into another part of the control panel. The Device Manager.

Open the device manager, and expand the section for "Universal Serial Bus controllers" by clicking on the arrow next to it. It should look similar to the image below.

Select the first item on the list by clicking on it, then right click and choose properties. A new window will open showing the properties of that device. If it has a power management tab, click that and look at the details, it should look like this ....

If the first box allowing the computer to turn off this device is checked, uncheck it.

If there is no tab for power management, we can ignore it an move on.

Now comes the monotonous part. We have to check every item in the USB Controller list, so it's a process of select, right click, properties, see if it has a power management tab, and make sure it's set to not allow the computer to turn it off.

Once you have gone through the entire USB controller list, you then have to click on Human Interface Devices, expand the list, and check every item on that list. If there are any other sections in device manager that are listed as USB items, make sure you also check those.

Once you have made sure that all USB devices have been configured, you can rest easy knowing that your computer will never shut down any of your devices again.

Well that's now the end of this article, and I hope you enjoyed reading it and feel more empowered over how your PC is running, and hopefully have put an end to your micro-stuttering problems as well as usb devices going to sleep. If you have any more suggestions or comments, please leave a comment below

S!

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