H1Z1 Stutter / freezing on new pc - help!

mdanielsbusso

Prominent
Sep 24, 2017
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510
So i built my first ever budget gaming pc a few weeks ago -

specs are as listed -
pentium g4400
gtx 1050 oc edition
4gb ddr4 ram (will upgrade to 8 when have the money)
asus h110m-d mobo
1tb HDD
500 EVGA 80+ PSU
AvP Pulse Case

I got H1Z1, and at 1080p low i see an avg of around 60/70 fps, and a low of around 40. However, there is a lot of stutter. I am aware that this may be due to the lack of ram, and cpu cores / threads (am upgrading in the future), but surley the stutter shouldnt be this bad? Ive tried 900p and 768p and it hinders the same results.

Any advice / fixes for this? Thanks - max!
 
Solution

The problem with being low on RAM is the HDD. When Windows starts swapping memory pages to disk, it seems to assign it a higher priority than anything else. Even the mouse pointer will freeze while it waits to move/retrieve a memory page to/from disk. (Which makes sense - it doesn't want a program to run into an inconsistent memory state or crash because a memory access failed.)

If OP had a SSD instead of a HDD, the problem would be significantly reduced, maybe even eliminated because a SSD is so much faster at these small file requests. But because it's...

JalYt_Justin

Reputable
Jun 12, 2017
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5,960
The RAM is a HUGE bottleneck especially when it comes to gaming. That's definitely the cause that I can see simply from hardware specs, let alone other driver issues, etc.

I'm sure your RAM is pegged at 100% while gaming, which is REALLY not ideal whatsoever.
 

The problem with being low on RAM is the HDD. When Windows starts swapping memory pages to disk, it seems to assign it a higher priority than anything else. Even the mouse pointer will freeze while it waits to move/retrieve a memory page to/from disk. (Which makes sense - it doesn't want a program to run into an inconsistent memory state or crash because a memory access failed.)

If OP had a SSD instead of a HDD, the problem would be significantly reduced, maybe even eliminated because a SSD is so much faster at these small file requests. But because it's a HDD, every time Windows needs to rearrange memory between RAM and the HDD, his system freezes while it waits for the HDD platter to rotate so the correct part of the disk is under the read/write heads.

I'd agree that the most likely cause is the low amount of RAM. You can try closing all unnecessary apps (make sure any browsers are actually closed, not staying resident in memory), and using Task Manager to kill processes belonging to any TSRs (like printer ink monitoring, Adobe Acrobat update checker, etc). Free up as much RAM as possible and try playing then. But the easier solution is to just upgrade to 8GB.
 
Solution