
Understand that older games needed less data to transfer than current-gen games. However, in really old games, you may get away with a 60fps lock. In most cases, a 30fps lock will guarantee you a stutter-free experience. So, what now? For games that are already out and have traversal stutters, you can experiment with lower framerates. In theory, DirectStorage may be able to solve this issue, though we’ll have to wait and see. This basically means that PC games can’t currently take advantage of the ridiculously high bandwidth of both the SATA SSD and the NVMe SSD. Right now, high-end CPUs can handle the aforementioned games at 30fps without any stutters.ĭuring our tests, we didn’t notice any difference between a SATA SSD and an NVMe SSD. Now if you decrease your CPU power then yes, you’ll get traversal stutters as the CPU may not be powerful enough to handle the amount of data that the game streams. This is also why you’ll notice longer traversal stutters if you install the game on an HDD. And that’s because the bottleneck is not in the CPU. In other words, increasing your CPU power will not result in any improvements. What you need to understand is that this is mainly a “ storage -> RAM” issue. So, if a game needs, let’s say, 25ms to load the data of its next zone from your storage to your RAM, the GPU will halt and you’ll get a stutter. By increasing your framerate to even 60fps, you immediately lower the time it takes to generate a frame to 16.6ms. Since it doesn’t take more time to transfer the data the game needs for its new/next zone, the game does not drop frames and runs consistently at 33.3ms. So, in most current-gen games, SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs can transfer the data a game needs during that timeframe without issues. At 30fps, the time it takes for the GPU to generate a frame is 33.3ms. The reason the 30fps lock eliminates these traversal stutters is simple. That’s the reason why traversal stutters can be reproduced so easily. So, whenever a player visits or returns to different “ areas“, the game will load their data. Most of the times, games divide their huge maps into smaller areas/zones. Rivatunner’s frame limiter in most cases, and that’s the one we recommend using.Īs showcased, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor runs with a flat frametime at 33.3ms, without any stutters while exploring the city of Koboh.īut what are exactly the traversal stutters? Simply put, these stutters can occur whenever the game loads new data during exploration. And no, don’t use any in-game frame limiter. By using Rivatunner, you can lock your framerate at 30fps. And, that’s basically the trick you need to do in order to completely eliminate the traversal stutters in the latest PC games. Now if you looked at the framerate, you may have noticed a 30fps lock.
