Hey all,
I've been struggling with microstutter as i know a lot of people have, and found a new method to prevent it.
I had only seen one person mention it Here, but they didnt get very much advice or a suitable method to cure it.
Circumstance
This only works if you use custom fan profiles to keep your GPU's cooler, therefore wont work if you use aftermarket cooling, or use stock fan settings.
Cause
I noticed when monitoring some stress tests that the FPS dipped every time the fan speed was automatically updated Via MSI Afterburner, giving me a noticeable jolt almost every second, as that was how often it was set to update.
Cure
Step 1
Disable gradual fan speed increases
Remove the sloped lines in your fan profile if using a graphical interface such as MSI Afterburner. This is done by double clicking in afterburner, i don't know about other programs. This should now show you with big steps where the fan speed changes.
Before and after

Step 2
Choose your Idle fan speed and Load fan speed.
I chose 40 for my idle speed as it is inaudible over the sound of my other fans, and 65 for my load fan speed, as this gives me a 65-70'c temp in game that i feel comfortable with. if you dont mind them getting higher, then give yourself a lower fan speed.
Step 3
Figure out which temperature to start your load fan speed.
To do this, set your fans to their load speed, play a game for a few minutes and record your peak temperature. Once you have this, take 5-10'C off to find an appropriate starting point. You can use Furmark here if you like, but i would advise taking off something nearer 15-20'c. I used 60'c as my transition point, as my load temps were between 65-70'c and my furmark temps are about 75-80'c
Step 4
Set up your profile
To do this, you'll need 3 points. The first is your idle speed, this shouldnt require a corresponding temperature. The second is your Load speed, with your corresponding start temperature. The third is fan 100% and your maximum temperature. I used 80'c as the temp i never want to exceed.
Refer to the "after" picture above to clarify which points i mean.
Step 5
Change the update time to 10s or 10,000ms
In afterburner this is called "Fan speed update period" and is directly below the fan profile image shown above.
You dont want your fans to update every 1 second or around the transition between load and idle, the fan will change between them over and over, becoming very annoying. However, a 10s update time allows the temperatures to cross far enough beyond the threshold to prevent this annoying "on-off" sound effect.
Step 6
Test it out!
Hopefully this will fix the problem for you as well as it did for me, i now enjoy very smooth framerates with no major stuttering, and it was fixing the fan profiles that did it.
One way to test it is watching your furmark framerates, they should be very stable and not change much at all, if you still get stuttering there will be a big difference between your min, max and average framerates.
You may wish to tweak the fan settings a little to get them perfect also.
Other remedies
This is just a cure for the fan speed update issue, as you will find all over the site there are numerous other issues. as well as updating the fan profiles I also did the following:
-Used matching clock speeds on the cards
-Used D3D Overrider (comes with rivatuner) to lock Vsync on and triple buffering
-Rolled back to 10.5 Drivers
-Did a Full driver sweep using Driver Sweeper before installing new drivers
I hope this helps people cure their Micro-stuttering headaches! Good Luck!
Edited by Piranha Joe - 8/8/10 at 7:34pm
I've been struggling with microstutter as i know a lot of people have, and found a new method to prevent it.
I had only seen one person mention it Here, but they didnt get very much advice or a suitable method to cure it.
Circumstance
This only works if you use custom fan profiles to keep your GPU's cooler, therefore wont work if you use aftermarket cooling, or use stock fan settings.
Cause
I noticed when monitoring some stress tests that the FPS dipped every time the fan speed was automatically updated Via MSI Afterburner, giving me a noticeable jolt almost every second, as that was how often it was set to update.
Cure
Step 1
Disable gradual fan speed increases
Remove the sloped lines in your fan profile if using a graphical interface such as MSI Afterburner. This is done by double clicking in afterburner, i don't know about other programs. This should now show you with big steps where the fan speed changes.
Before and after

Step 2
Choose your Idle fan speed and Load fan speed.
I chose 40 for my idle speed as it is inaudible over the sound of my other fans, and 65 for my load fan speed, as this gives me a 65-70'c temp in game that i feel comfortable with. if you dont mind them getting higher, then give yourself a lower fan speed.
Step 3
Figure out which temperature to start your load fan speed.
To do this, set your fans to their load speed, play a game for a few minutes and record your peak temperature. Once you have this, take 5-10'C off to find an appropriate starting point. You can use Furmark here if you like, but i would advise taking off something nearer 15-20'c. I used 60'c as my transition point, as my load temps were between 65-70'c and my furmark temps are about 75-80'c
Step 4
Set up your profile
To do this, you'll need 3 points. The first is your idle speed, this shouldnt require a corresponding temperature. The second is your Load speed, with your corresponding start temperature. The third is fan 100% and your maximum temperature. I used 80'c as the temp i never want to exceed.
Refer to the "after" picture above to clarify which points i mean.
Step 5
Change the update time to 10s or 10,000ms
In afterburner this is called "Fan speed update period" and is directly below the fan profile image shown above.
You dont want your fans to update every 1 second or around the transition between load and idle, the fan will change between them over and over, becoming very annoying. However, a 10s update time allows the temperatures to cross far enough beyond the threshold to prevent this annoying "on-off" sound effect.
Step 6
Test it out!
Hopefully this will fix the problem for you as well as it did for me, i now enjoy very smooth framerates with no major stuttering, and it was fixing the fan profiles that did it.
One way to test it is watching your furmark framerates, they should be very stable and not change much at all, if you still get stuttering there will be a big difference between your min, max and average framerates.
You may wish to tweak the fan settings a little to get them perfect also.
Other remedies
This is just a cure for the fan speed update issue, as you will find all over the site there are numerous other issues. as well as updating the fan profiles I also did the following:
-Used matching clock speeds on the cards
-Used D3D Overrider (comes with rivatuner) to lock Vsync on and triple buffering
-Rolled back to 10.5 Drivers
-Did a Full driver sweep using Driver Sweeper before installing new drivers
I hope this helps people cure their Micro-stuttering headaches! Good Luck!
Edited by Piranha Joe - 8/8/10 at 7:34pm





