Why is my Zotac RTX 5060 Ti stuttering in The Last of Us Part II?
Every time I hit a heavily forested area, my FPS would plummet from 80 down to 42, making combat feel like a slide show. Even though the Zotac GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB has plenty of VRAM, it kept dipping into power-saving mode during low-load transitions, causing the core clock to bounce between 1100MHz and 2300MHz with latency spikes of 25-40ms. I tried dropping texture quality to Medium, but the game looked like mud and the drops didn't stop—it was a total waste of time. I eventually went into the NVIDIA Control Panel, switched Power Management Mode to 'Prefer Maximum Performance', and set Texture Filtering Quality to 'High Performance'. Checking RivaTuner, my 1% Lows jumped from 31 FPS to 58 FPS, which was a night-and-day difference. The only downside was the idle temp rose from 40℃ to 52℃, but a custom fan curve fixed that. VRAM usage is now steady at 9.8-11.2GB, and the input lag is gone.
