Stutter Check

What it does

Runs the checks every "my game stutters" thread tells you to go through, in one click, and sorts the results into what needs a look, what TrayTrigger can fix, and what's fine. It only reports: nothing changes until you press a button, and nothing it finds in another app is ever edited or closed.

It has its own Stutter Check tab on the System page, and the All tab still shows it above the performance tweaks.

What it checks

• Overlay apps running - Discord, the NVIDIA App overlay, RivaTuner (RTSS), Medal, Overwolf and the Xbox Game Bar. One is normal; two or more at once is the most common cause of stutter in the fix threads.
• Browser and chat apps holding video memory - Chrome, Edge, Brave and Discord with hardware acceleration on, and how much GPU memory they hold right now.
• Display refresh rate - a monitor running below the fastest rate it offers at its resolution.
• Memory speed - RAM running below its rated speed, which means XMP or EXPO is off in the BIOS.
• Memory sticks - a single stick in a board with room for more, which runs on one memory channel. Memory soldered to the board, and boards with one slot, are left out.
• Games on a hard drive - library games installed on an HDD rather than an SSD.
• Drive space - a drive that holds games or Windows with under 10 % (or 20 GB) free. Shader caches, the pagefile and patches all need room.
• Shader cache - the NVIDIA driver's cache capped, or Windows cleanups set to delete the DirectX shader cache. A game recompiling shaders as you play is the most-cited cause of stutter in the fix threads. Fix it applies the tweak.
• PCIe lanes - a graphics card on fewer lanes than it supports.
• Resizable BAR - off on a card that can use it.
• Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling, Game Bar recording, Game Mode - the System tweaks that matter for stutter. Fix it applies the tweak, which Restore Previous can undo. Game Mode is the contested one: Microsoft recommends it on, and some threads blame it for hitching in particular games, so try it the other way for a game that still stutters. On a dual-CCD Ryzen X3D, though, leaving it off can cost a game its place on the V-Cache cores.
• Power plan - whether the Ultimate plan is on, or switched to while a game runs.
• Core Isolation - reported, never changed: it is a security boundary.
• Windows Search - whether the indexer is busy right now.
• AMD V-Cache optimizer - on a dual-chiplet X3D CPU (7900X3D, 7950X3D, 9950X3D), whether AMD's V-Cache optimizer service is running. It keeps games on the cores with the extra cache. Single-chiplet X3D CPUs (5800X3D, 7800X3D, 9800X3D) don't need it and aren't checked.
• Paging file - Windows with no paging file, or a custom one under 4 GB. Without one Windows can't use memory beyond your RAM, and some games hitch or crash when they run out. The default, Windows-managed setting is reported as fine.
• Intel Application Optimization - on a Core Ultra or 14th-gen K CPU, whether Intel's APO is installed.

A check that can't be made on this PC - no dedicated GPU, HAGS not supported, the indexer not running - is left out rather than shown as a problem, so the count is what was actually checked.

The buttons

• Stutter Check runs by itself a few seconds after TrayTrigger starts, and again when you open the System page if the last result is more than ten minutes old, so the card always has a verdict. It never runs while a game is running, and a Fix it or the preset re-runs it.
• Run Again (and the Refresh at the right of the Performance Tweaks heading) reads everything again. It takes a second or two and runs nothing with administrator rights.
• Copy Results puts the whole list on the clipboard, ready for a forum post or a bug report. The same lines are in Copy Diagnostic Info.
• Fix it applies one of the tweaks below, with its usual prompt if it needs one.
• Here's how opens the page for that app or setting.
• Open Display Settings and Open Core Isolation open the Windows setting.

Details

• Overlay apps are found by their running processes. Steam's overlay only exists while a game runs, so it isn't counted.
• Hardware acceleration is read from each browser's Local State file and Discord's settings.json; the files are only read. GPU memory per process comes from the same Windows counters Task Manager's Details tab shows.
• Windows Search counts as busy when SearchIndexer uses more than about 3 % of the CPU over a short sample.
• Intel APO is looked for as the installed Store app; Intel's download is linked from its Here's how page.

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Part of Performance Tweaks. This page is the same text as the app's Learn more button, generated from Help/tweaks/stutter_check.md. To fix something, edit that file (or open an issue); wiki edits are overwritten on the next sync.