Why is my Ryzen 9 9950X3D dropping frames in Atomic Heart?
Fighting these complex mechanical enemies, I kept an eye on CPU usage and noticed that even with low load, frame times were jumping between 16ms - 32ms. The 9950X3D's massive cache is a beast, but Atomic Heart's instruction set causes threads to bounce between the two CCDs, which feels like a micro-stutter. I tried enabling forced sync in the emulator settings, but that pushed input lag up to 20ms—it felt sluggish, so I ditched that immediately. I updated the BIOS to the latest version and used a process affinity tool to lock the game's main thread to the cores with the 3D V-Cache. The frame time analyzer showed the jitter narrowed down to a tight 16ms - 18ms range, and the game feels silky again. I did have a brief system hang when I first locked the cores, but it went away after I reassigned the background service threads. CPU is at 55℃ - 62℃ and RAM is 40℃ - 45℃. Internal benchmarks confirm everything is verified.