How to stop the RX 9070 XT from stuttering in Apex Legends?
During fast slides and weapon swaps, my frame rate would tank from 240 FPS down to 110 FPS, which is absolutely lethal in a competitive shooter. The core frequency of the Sapphire Pure Polar RX 9070 XT was struggling with a scheduling conflict between the driver and the Windows power plan, causing frame times to jump wildly between 4-15ms. I first tried enabling 'Maximum Performance' in the driver, but that just bumped core temps up by 5℃ without fixing a single stutter—a total waste of time. I eventually used DDU to completely wipe the old drivers, installed the latest stable WHQL version, and manually purged 3.2GB of shader cache. Looking at the RTSS frametime graph, the spikes finally flattened out to 4-7ms. Interestingly, the game took an extra 30 seconds to boot after the cache wipe until I updated my motherboard chipset drivers. Now, core temps sit comfortably between 62-68℃ with steady fan speeds, and my actual frame generation time is locked in at 4.2-6.8ms.
