Hi everyone! I’ve been experiencing some strange stuttering and freezing issues in Elden Ring and Black Myth: Wukong. My PC setup is a Ryzen 9950X, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and 64GB of RAM. A few days ago, everything was running smoothly, but today, when I launched Elden Ring, the game freezes for a moment every second, making it completely unplayable. The audio continues to play without issue, which is confusing. In Black Myth: Wukong, the performance seems fine, but the controller input freezes in the same way—about half a second every second. The keyboard and mouse work perfectly in that game, and the controller itself functions normally on its own.
My CPU and GPU temperatures are both under 70 degrees, so overheating isn’t the problem. The GPU usage graph mirrors the freezes, fluctuating between 0% and 100% rapidly. I’ve disabled Windows updates, but some security updates were still installed. I also rolled back my NVIDIA drivers to an older version to fix graphical glitches in Wukong, but that was done some time ago, and both games worked fine after that. I’m at a loss as to what caused this sudden issue.
After some troubleshooting, I thought the problem might be with my USB ports. I disconnected several devices, and the issue went away. When I reconnected them one by one, the problem didn’t return, so I wasn’t sure what exactly was causing it. It seemed like the game threads were freezing when trying to read USB input. Elden Ring might be using the same thread for both graphics and input, which explains why the entire game would freeze. In other games, only the input was affected.
To my surprise, I had previously asked ChatGPT about the issue, and it suggested USB ports could be the cause—but I didn’t take it seriously. Turns out, I was wrong.
Later, I realized the real issue was my custom ZMK keyboard and dual-booting between Linux and Windows. The keyboard was connected to Windows, then to Linux, and when I booted back into Windows, it tried to reconnect via Bluetooth every second, failing each time. This caused lag, even though the keyboard was connected via USB. I had assumed the USB connection would bypass the Bluetooth issue, but it seems the system was still attempting to reconnect through Bluetooth, leading to the input freezes.
That GPU usage spiking between 0-100% is a huge red flag—I had something similar happen in Cyberpunk after a driver update, and it turned out to be a power management setting in NVIDIA Control Panel forcing the GPU to sleep between frames. Have you tried switching to “Prefer Maximum Performance” under global settings?
Great point about the GPU usage spikes—that’s definitely a red flag worth investigating. Since you mentioned the NVIDIA power management setting, I’d suggest trying “Prefer Maximum Performance” mode and also checking if any recent Windows or driver updates might have reset your power plans. Let me know if that helps resolve the stuttering, and feel free to share how it goes!