MSi Afterburner Potential 1% Lows & Stutter Issues - FIXED

[oliv_r]

TLDR; MSI Afterburner's 'Power' & 'Power Percent' causes very bad 1% Lows to the point that it completely stutters your game. Therefore disable them, likewise:

This was tested by other people in this reddit thread, Dannyz (YouTube), my wife and I's respective gaming PCs (5950X & 3950X). My 5950X & 4070 Ti Super was struggling against huge mobs in Path of Exile 2 for the past two weeks since launch to the point where I had to lower all settings. But even then, same bad Lows and stutters persist even if I go 720p.

This all changed when I ran into Dannyz video, linked above and confirmation from other testers in the reddit thread linked above as well. I implemented their suggestions on both rigs at home and voila: my frametimes had been immaculate, 1% Lows are upwards of 110+ fps, no more stutters and GSync is functioning fine on the highest settings for PoE 2. I have yet to test other games but I am confident it will do the same thing: give me a smoother and better gaming experience.

google search tags: fix stutter amd cpu 5950x 9800x3d "x3d" poe 2 reddit msi afterburner techpowerup tech power up issue latency frametime frame time fps 2023 2024 2025

 

[harm9963]

TLDR; MSI Afterburner's 'Power' & 'Power Percent' causes very bad 1% Lows to the point that it completely stutters your game. Therefore disable them, likewise:
View attachment 377119

This was tested by other people in this reddit thread, Dannyz (YouTube), my wife and I's respective gaming PCs (5950X & 3950X). My 5950X & 4070 Ti Super was struggling against huge mobs in Path of Exile 2 for the past two weeks since launch to the point where I had to lower all settings. But even then, same bad Lows and stutters persist even if I go 720p.

This all changed when I ran into Dannyz video, linked above and confirmation from other testers in the reddit thread linked above as well. I implemented their suggestions on both rigs at home and voila: my frametimes had been immaculate, 1% Lows are upwards of 110+ fps, no more stutters and GSync is functioning fine on the highest settings for PoE 2. I have yet to test other games but I am confident it will do the same thing: give me a smoother and better gaming experience.

google search tags: fix stutter amd cpu 5950x 9800x3d "x3d" poe 2 reddit msi afterburner techpowerup tech power up issue latency frametime frame time fps 2023 2024 2025

Never had that issue, power percent and power, only use power for display and monitoring -Tray icon / power percent only in monitoring , but I only play at 4K .

 

[oliv_r]

Never had that issue, power percent and power, only use power for display and monitoring -Tray icon / power percent only in monitoring , but I only play at 4K .

It's case by case - for most, people with X3D chips were seeing the issue. For some reason same thing applied to my heavily PBO'd 5950X (-15 fastest four, -25 rest). I also tested it with Afterburner's monitoring window open in my other screen. When it was enabled, the moment Power started spiking up, my game, in this case PoE 2, started stuttering. I also tested turning off Auto Start on Afterburner and performance was fine (this was before unchecking Power & Power Percent) - I utilized GPU-Z to monitor sensors; no bad dips and stutters.

But like I said, extremely case by case but behavior mostly affected X3D chip owners.

 

[mkdr]

It is the same bug as I reported a year ago on here with HwInfo, happens with both HwInfo and MSI AB mostly also other tools:

Read through all posts on here:

HwInfo causing FPS drop anomalies on Nvidia GPUs with VSync

There is a weird bug since months in combination of Nvidia drivers on Windows 11 and HwInfo running, causing FPS not be stable at VSync cap. If you have a monitor which doesnt support Gsync, so it just uses VSync, and have HwInfo running, there is a weird glitch happening, that the FPS is not...

www.hwinfo.com

HwInfo causing FPS drop anomalies on Nvidia GPUs with VSync

Well I did some gaming test (avatar FOP, which is know to be quite well optimized, at least for frametime) and the result is that HWinfo64 GPU monitoring is somehow creating frametime spikes when Vsync is on. See below picture, on the top, with HWinfo64 GPU monitoring (1000ms pooling), it...

www.hwinfo.com

"It seems to me that the scope of the issue is wider than just NVML. In my case, HWiNFO GPU monitoring is causing frametime spikes even if I disable monitoring of all GPU sensors and NVML (but keep GPU monitoring enabled). By comparison, MSI Afterburner causes frametime spikes only if GPU Power monitoring is enabled. And the root cause of this behavior is NVAPI power call by itself (I verified it myself by calling NvAPI_GPU_ClientPowerTopologyGetStatus). So, I'm making a conclusion that NVAPI calls for GPU Power metrics are flawed. But other metrics should work without noticeable issues. Which is not the case with HWiNFO for some reason even if NVML is disabled."

The micro stutters happen with all kinds of tools which read power stats from Nvidia GPU.

I had also reported this btw to the autor (unwinder) of MSI AB and RTSS, and he answered in the same ignorant way as he always does, claiming it had nothing to do with it.

 

[eidairaman1]

TLDR; MSI Afterburner's 'Power' & 'Power Percent' causes very bad 1% Lows to the point that it completely stutters your game. Therefore disable them, likewise:
View attachment 377119

This was tested by other people in this reddit thread, Dannyz (YouTube), my wife and I's respective gaming PCs (5950X & 3950X). My 5950X & 4070 Ti Super was struggling against huge mobs in Path of Exile 2 for the past two weeks since launch to the point where I had to lower all settings. But even then, same bad Lows and stutters persist even if I go 720p.

This all changed when I ran into Dannyz video, linked above and confirmation from other testers in the reddit thread linked above as well. I implemented their suggestions on both rigs at home and voila: my frametimes had been immaculate, 1% Lows are upwards of 110+ fps, no more stutters and GSync is functioning fine on the highest settings for PoE 2. I have yet to test other games but I am confident it will do the same thing: give me a smoother and better gaming experience.

google search tags: fix stutter amd cpu 5950x 9800x3d "x3d" poe 2 reddit msi afterburner techpowerup tech power up issue latency frametime frame time fps 2023 2024 2025

Ever report this to msi?

 

[mkdr]

Ever report this to msi?

you read what I said in the post above yours, right?

 

[AlexUnwinder]

> I had also reported this btw to the autor (unwinder) of MSI AB and RTSS, and he answered in the same ignorant way as he always does, claiming it had nothing to do with it.

Not everything you report is valuable. And not every answer you get is ignorant, it may be simply just a bit beyond of your technical info understanding level. If you reread your own quote a few times, you'll probably understand why it not up to me, Martin or Michael to fix anything in our tools.

The bootleneck is well known for decade, documented in each tool's support and it is located inside NVIDIA driver's NvAPI_GPU_ClientPowerTopologyGetStatus and CPU stalls there. That's why HwInfo includes monitoring profiling tool, allowing you to identify such sensor. That's why MSI AB contains performance profiling tool. And that's what skilled users use to troubleshoot such issues in _seconds_. But some reviewers like author of this video have no ideas that such toolsets exist and prefer to host hype clickbait videos with wrong conclusions.

 

[mkdr]

^

and he answered in the same ignorant way as he always does