What causes random stutters during games?

[Teggy]

I'm playing The Witcher (1) right now on my Macbook Pro. It has a Radeon HD 6750m and handles the game very well. I turned off AA and I often get 90+ fps during normal play. In fact, I've been meaning to bump settings up to high with AA off and see how it does.

Anyway, I'll find that if I'm just running around the village in the first chapter I will occasionally get a random stutter. It's very quick, but almost like a record skipping, but with video. It happens at very quiet times, so it's not something associated with the graphics card getting taxed. I have noticed this happen at times with Rift as well, although being an MMO, I suppose that could be lag.

Does anyone know what types of things might be causing these stutters? I have very little running on the machine besides Steam and Avast. Could it be virus scans? Curious if anyone has experienced something like this.

[Gryndyl]

I always attribute stutter like that to new textures or sounds being loaded into RAM, particularly when the RAM is already under full load and has to drop something to accommodate.

[Teggy]

I always attribute stutter like that to new textures or sounds being loaded into RAM, particularly when the RAM is already under full load and has to drop something to accommodate.

Hm, well I have 8GB of system RAM and 1GB of VRAM.

[CeeKay]

is it just The Witcher, or do other games have the stutter too?  if it's just Witcher it might be some of the games quirkiness and not your system.

[Teggy]

is it just The Witcher, or do other games have the stutter too?  if it's just Witcher it might be some of the games quirkiness and not your system.

Well, it's hard to say, I don't have a ton of examples to go on. I saw it a little bit when I was playing Portal (1) but I am definitely noticing it more often with the Witcher. It's also not nearly as frequently with Rift and often I don't see it at all. The fact that I would see it some times but not others with Rift and Portal made me wonder if it was something running in the background periodically. I'll do a restart and check what's running before I play Witcher tonight and then see how often it happens.

[Razgon]

Heat and dust will cause random hiccups as well- have you checked fan speed and temperatures?

[Teggy]

Heat and dust will cause random hiccups as well- have you checked fan speed and temperatures?

I haven't but I have been meaning to download a tool. The machine is only about a month old, so I don't think it's dust, but there have been some issues with the thermal paste on these machines.

[Giles Habibula]

I'm getting this too in "The Witcher", and also a few other games. I first noticed it when I loaded "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" onto my new i7 machine (Win 7 64 bit Premium, 8 gigs ram, GTX460). It's especially annoying because Amnesia ran flawlessly on my old Q6600 Vista 64 bit machine (6 gigs ram, GTX260). I wasn't able to find anybody else having this problem with Amnesia, so I'm assuming it's something with my computer. I was thinking that maybe it had something to do with when I ran "tafferpatcher" for "Thief 2", as that game exhibits the same behavior: a brief hitch maybe every minute or so. Anyway, it appears to be specific to a certain few games in my case.

Other games run perfectly, such as "Crysis 2", "Necrovision", "Far Cry 2", "The Precursors", and many more.

I dunno. It's been bugging me for months, and baffling me. Googling has turned up no help.
My current guess is something running in the background, but I haven't taken the time to start shutting processes down one by one.

[Biyobi]

Copy protection (even on Steam games) can cause stuttering while it does it's checks.  Antivirus updates can do the same.

[Jeff Benson]

network adapter might be the problem

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[Vidiot]

I think you know what I would suggest. 

Seriously though, does the HDD light ever come on?  Even with a bunch of RAM games are sometimes dumb about loading.