Strange micro stuttering (FFIV)

[TheVagrantWarrior]

Hi guys,

i get strange micro stutters every 15-20 seconds in FFIV. The game stays at 60fps but for 1-2 seconds the game is stuttering.

Any tips?

[LunaMoo]

Most common reason for stutter is texture upscaling, if you used it, disable and the stutter should go away as there's no CPU in existence that can upscale textures in real time without any stutter and it does oblierate frame time even if FPS counter shows no drops(FPS is just an average value and hides inconsistent behaviours like ocassional drops which ruin the experience, hence why modern hardware reviews tend to go for frametime graphs and people that care value consistency much more than higher average).

With gaming GPU and Vulkan backend you could also enable hardware texture scaling, on powerful gaming gpu it can be fast enough to avoid stutter, but it's experimental and buggy still(ignores alpha resulting in some artifacts in place of transparent stuff) as such requires ini edit to activate.
In 2D game it might be better to just activate 5xBRv2 post process shader and don't bother upscaling textures, especially since with some games it can result in artifacts and 2D Final Fantasy games for sure get artifacts from increased rendering res so upscaling shader is the only solution that avoids artifacts.

Another reason of stutter at least on PC's with windows could be Vsync on some rare configurations that started popping out recently, typically it's best to upgrade to a modern(variable refresh rate) display and never bother with Vsync ever again upgrading experience for everything, not just PPSSPP, but even if you can't do that, just try disabling Vsync making sure it's not enforced in your graphics drivers settings either(generally enforcing stuff via graphics drivers hacks tend to be bad, doesn't matter if it works great for 80% of the popular PC games out there which drivers are tested and optimized for).

There are other things you can try [Unknown] made a list of those HERE, but overall the two above are the most common for people with this problem.