Steam game stutters every few seconds despite high FPS
Environment
Windows 11 gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7800X3D, RTX 4070 and the game installed on NVMe.
What happens
The counter stays above 120 FPS but frame-time spikes occur at regular intervals.
What I have tried
Lowered graphics settings, disabled overlays and verified the game files.
I would appreciate advice on how to identify the root cause without risking existing data or configuration.
Verified community troubleshooting
This looks less like a hardware failure and more like a configuration issue.
Likely cause: A peripheral monitoring service polls hardware sensors and blocks the game thread.
What I would try: Record a frame-time trace, stop RGB and hardware-monitoring services one at a time, then update or remove the service that matches the spikes.
Keep an eye on the relevant logs during the test; they should confirm whether the hypothesis is correct.
Good point about changing one thing at a time. I had been testing several settings together.