Stuttering on GTA V Enhanced Edition. (14th June 2025)

[drytable]

GTA V Enhanced Edition have been stuttering ever since I started playing on my new laptop, all my other games like Cyberpunk or RDR2 work great on high settings but for some reason GTA V just suffers incredibly low 1% lows (whooping 7fps!!) and constantly has frame spikes. No matter what settings I use (Normal, High, Very High, RT) the stutters are always there and doesn't seem to get better with lower settings. I tried redownloading the game, updating the game to it's latest patch, upgrading and downgrading Nvidia drivers, disabling core isolation and HAGS, disabling GameBarPresence, capping framerates to 60fps with Nvidia Control Panel, undervolting... Everything I seem to do, the stutters are always there. It's kinda driving me crazy because it's a 10 year old game and shouldn't be this hard to run. Any other suggestions that might help are very welcomed. 
 

Specs: i5-12450H, RTX 4050 Laptop 75W, 24gb DDR4, 1TB NVME SSD

Note: I only played story mode so far, so all the stutters probably have nothing to do with CPU unable to handle the game since I'm not in online mode. (could be wrong but I think it's highly unlikely)

Edited June 13 by drytable

[Airwolf359]

Despite being upgraded to DirectX 12 and having ray tracing, GTA V Enhanced still has the old issue of a very heavy main thread that will bog down one CPU core while the rest of your CPU is only lightly loaded. It also doesn't like to run at high frame rates, so a frame limit is a must. I use the built-in one and it works fine for me.

 

Since you're on a laptop, here's a few things to check:

• While playing GTA V, do you have the power cord plugged in, and the Windows Power Plan set to High Performance? (and also high performance mode in nVidia control panel) (if you are worried about battery longevity, most laptops have an option to only charge it to 80%)
• Is your laptop flat on your desk, or on a laptop cooling pad? Just to be sure your CPU isn't overheating and/or downclocking. (since you mention undervolting)
• Do you have monitoring software, like MSI afterburner overlay, to monitor what happens to CPU/GPU usage during those FPS spikes? (monitor at least temperatures, clock speeds, and usage% for CPU, GPU and RAM)

I don't think disabling core isolation or HAGS is necessary (I certainly have those still enabled), but I have disabled GameBarPresence since I don't use the game bar.

As for nVidia drivers, I prefer the studio versions over the game-ready versions, they are not always optimized for the highest fps, but they are optimized for long term stability.

Edited June 16 by Airwolf359

[drytable]

 

On 6/16/2025 at 3:58 PM, Airwolf359 said:

Despite being upgraded to DirectX 12 and having ray tracing, GTA V Enhanced still has the old issue of a very heavy main thread that will bog down one CPU core while the rest of your CPU is only lightly loaded. It also doesn't like to run at high frame rates, so a frame limit is a must. I use the built-in one and it works fine for me.

 

Since you're on a laptop, here's a few things to check:

• While playing GTA V, do you have the power cord plugged in, and the Windows Power Plan set to High Performance? (and also high performance mode in nVidia control panel) (if you are worried about battery longevity, most laptops have an option to only charge it to 80%)
• Is your laptop flat on your desk, or on a laptop cooling pad? Just to be sure your CPU isn't overheating and/or downclocking. (since you mention undervolting)
• Do you have monitoring software, like MSI afterburner overlay, to monitor what happens to CPU/GPU usage during those FPS spikes? (monitor at least temperatures, clock speeds, and usage% for CPU, GPU and RAM)

I don't think disabling core isolation or HAGS is necessary (I certainly have those still enabled), but I have disabled GameBarPresence since I don't use the game bar.

As for nVidia drivers, I prefer the studio versions over the game-ready versions, they are not always optimized for the highest fps, but they are optimized for long term stability.

Yes I tried capping the frame rate to 60 with the built-in one and external one (Nvidia Control Panel), the stutters didn't go away unfortunately.

For the power cord. I do make sure to plug in my laptop before playing any games on it so that shouldn't be the problem. My laptop is on a laptop cooler (albeit a cheap one that probably isn't very effective) but the air flow shouldn't be a problem also. I did try and monitor my RAM, CPU and GPU usage while the spikes happen and I did notice that my CPU's usage did shoot up substantially (from 65 to 90-95) when the stutters hit but it's not very consistent. Sometimes it goes all the way to 95 during stutters, sometimes it stays at 70 during them too. 

For studio drivers, I did try using them to see if the game would become more stable, however it still yielded the same results so I switched back to game ready drivers anyways. 

Edited June 17 by drytable