Periodic ~200ms stutters in VALORANT on 7800X3D - even with RTX 3080 physically removed
I’ve been dealing with a strange stuttering problem in VALORANT. Every few seconds I get a short but very noticeable stall, sometimes fairly periodic and especially noticeable during fights. My system is a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 3080 and Gigabyte B850 AORUS Elite WiFi 7 on Windows 11. I’ve already reinstalled Windows completely, updated BIOS, tested different FPS caps, closed background software, changed mouse polling rate and tested both Wi-Fi and USB tethering. Packet loss stays at 0%. I also physically removed the RTX 3080 and tested VALORANT only on the integrated graphics of the 7800X3D. The same stutters still happened, so the NVIDIA GPU itself doesn’t seem to be the cause. I recorded the issue with WPR/WPA as well. During one stutter there is roughly a 200 ms period where VALORANT’s CPU activity almost completely drops, while the system itself is mostly idle. I also don’t see a matching long DPC/ISR spike. One strange detail: after my latest clean Windows install, VALORANT initially ran smoothly. Windows Update had installed NVIDIA driver 32.0.15.9186. After I installed 32.0.16.1088 through the NVIDIA App, the stuttering returned. Rolling back to 32.0.15.9186 did not remove it again. Has anyone had something similar on a 7800X3D/AM5 system? I’m especially wondering about Vanguard, fTPM/TPM, AMD PSP/chipset, Windows 11 security features or BIOS/AGESA. If anyone had this exact kind of periodic stall and found the cause, I’d really like to know what fixed it.