Back in late 2023, when I just built my new gaming PC, I used to have this issue where some games, for example, League of Legends (yeah, yeah, i know) would freeze for a few seconds. There was a little audio crack at the same time as well.
This didn't just happen in League of Legends though, it also happened in Hogwarts Legacy and it was VERY annoying.
So I went on a quest to eliminate this issue. In this article we'll take a look at how I managed to do it and some other tips about your first few weeks with new hardware.
The problem
Well I wasn't sure what the problem was at first, but after doing some googling, I figured out it has something to do with latency.
So I downloaded this neat software LatencyMon that shows you how your system handles real-time audio.
Most of the time it would be fine, then my screen would freeze for 2-3 seconds and I'd get these crazy amounts of latency.
The solution(s)
Fixing this wasn't really straightforward, as most of the "solutions" online help me at all. I'll list some of them here anyway.
1. Stress-testing your PC
This is what worked for me. It's rather unconventional, but it fixed both this issue, and another issue of coil whine in my GPU.
I guess the parts just needed to warm up a little? 🔍🐢❓
Try running a heavy benchmark on both your CPU and GPU for a 3-4 hours. I'd recommend something like OCCT that stresses both parts in different ways.
2. Getting matching display cables for your monitors
You can skip this if you're only using 1 monitor.
If you have more than 1 monitor connected to your GPU and their cables are not matching (for example, HDMI for monitor A and DisplayPort for monitor B), you can try getting a 2nd DisplayPort cable and using it instead of the HDMI one.
3. Turning off USB selective suspeding
If you have a lot of connected USB devices, you can try disabling USB selective suspending.
Make sure to also use a High Performance or Ultimate Performance power plan. If you don't have the Ultimate Performance power plan as an option, you can enable it with this command:a
powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb614. Disabling GPU audio
If you're not using AMD/Nvidia High Definition Audio Device (audio coming from your monitor cables), you can disable it in Sound settings.
5. Increase your minimum GPU clock
Another popular solution (that makes perfect sense) is to increase your minimum GPU frequency in AMD Adrenaline.
This won't make your GPU usage run at high frequencies at all times. It's more of a soft minimum floor, that triggers once you start playing a demanding game.
You may be using a little more power this way though.
I have my GPU overclocked here (I won the silicon lottery), so I can set the minimum frequency to 200 less than the maximum frequency.
Conclusion and thoughts
Well, that's about it. Every system has a different solution to high DPC latency, but these are what mostly work for people.
Of course, make sure to also check your drivers and BIOS firmware for updates.