Why is Red Dead Redemption 2 stuttering on the TUF B760M?
Riding through the busy streets of Saint Denis was a nightmare; the micro-stutters were so bad it completely killed the immersion. I dug into the telemetry and found the ASUS TUF B760M-PLUS VRM was struggling with transient spikes, causing the Vcore to tank from 1.25V down to 1.18V, which sent my clock speeds swinging wildly between 4.2GHz and 3.8GHz. I tried enabling the High Performance power plan in Windows, but that only gained me about 2 FPS and did absolutely nothing for the voltage instability—it was just a band-aid on a bullet wound. I eventually dove into the BIOS Advanced Power Management and switched the Load-Line Calibration from Auto to L2 mode, while bumping the offset voltage to +0.03V. Checking HWMonitor in real-time, the voltage ripple shrunk from 0.07V to a tight 0.02V range, and my frame times finally leveled out between 14-15ms. I actually pushed the voltage too hard on my first attempt and triggered a hard reboot, but once I dialed the Vcore back to 1.22V, it became rock solid. The VRM temps stayed around 62-68℃ with fans spinning at 1200-1400 RPM. After running a few benchmarks, the clock jumping is gone, though I noticed the VRM still runs a bit toasty at 68℃ under full load.
