System Timer Resolution

What it changes

Restores the older behaviour where any process asking for a high-resolution system timer raises it for the whole system, instead of only for itself.

Why it helps

• Windows 10 version 2004 and Windows 11 made timer resolution per-process. A game that does not request a fine timer itself can be left on the coarse default tick of about 15.6 milliseconds.
• That coarse tick shows up as stutter, uneven frame pacing, or a frame rate that will not go above a certain ceiling.
• With this on, as long as anything on the system asks for a fine timer, every process benefits.

Trade-offs

• A finer timer means slightly more CPU wake-ups at idle, so marginally higher idle power use.
• Most modern engines request the timer themselves and see no difference.

Requires a restart and administrator rights.

Details

• Sets GlobalTimerResolutionRequests=1 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel.
• This is the value Microsoft documented alongside the per-process timer change.

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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/timer_resolution.md. To fix something, edit that file (or open an issue); wiki edits are overwritten on the next sync.