what is hitching in games?

Hitching is the term for a video game that slows down or pauses because it can’t keep up with what you’re doing. What causes hitching and how to stop it, we’ll explore in this article.

Hitching

Hitching is when a computer program that renders a video game, such as a video card or processor, cannot handle what you’re doing and slows down or pauses.

Hitching is the term for a video game that slows down or pauses because it can’t keep up with what you’re doing. The computer program rendering the graphics has to make calculations with every single pixel on the screen – if there are too many pixels moving around, it will slow down or pause. This is why games that are more taxing on hardware, like first-person shooters or action games, tend to hitch more than puzzle or strategy games.

There are some things you can do to help reduce hitching in your game. One is to close all other programs running on your computer – if the processor is busy with something else, it’s going to leave less power for the game. You can also try updating your video card drivers; sometimes the newest drivers have fixes for rendering issues that can cause hitching. And finally, you can lower the graphics settings in your game. This will make the game run a bit slower, but it might be worth it if you’re experiencing hitching.

why is hitching?

Hitching is when your game stops for a fraction of a second. This means that the framerate drops to zero momentarily, then resumes as normal. You might think this sounds okay, but it’s very annoying in practice. And it doesn’t really even need to drop the framerate all the way down to zero for it to be extremely noticable – dropping down even 1 or 2 FPS will make playing feel choppy and unpleasant. Even if your aim is 60 fps at all times, you should still lower vsync into account with hitching because hitching can cause screen tearing which can be worse than stuttering

what causes hitching?

Some causes:

1 – low framerate / vsync on / too much lag: play in windowed or borderless windowed mode and turn down your settings until you can aim for 60 FPS at all times. this will prevent hitching caused by the lowest framerates

2 – V-Sync on / framerate too high: turn off vsync in nvidia control panel or amd equivalent, change your settings so that you are playing at a lower framerate that is equal to or slightly higher than your refreshrate.

3 – bad CPU / RAM / HDD / GPU bottleneck: having a bad PC will cause hitching regardless of what you do. If your computer cannot reach anywhere near around 30 fps most of the time, it will hithch regardless of if it’s because it can’t run the game properly or because there are too many enemies/players on screen.

-when you play at 1440p and your computer cannot reach 60 fps no matter what, set everything to high or upper mid instead of ultra.

-if you have a laptop with all-around very powerful hardware, you’re fine. if your graphics card is worse than a 1050 but still more powerful than the 1050ti/1060, it’s also fine. anything more powerful even than that is probably not bottlenecked by its gpu, but laptops are just different so i dont know for sure

some ways i can avoid hitching?

-don’t dual core processors (if you do, set affinity to only use one core of the cpu)

-use a better graphics cards (if you do, get an nvidia card and dont buy it prebuilt)

-never accept microsoft updates (this isnt actually true but it would be nice if more people did this so they would give us back our start menu :/)

-if you absolutely cannot avoid hitching, tweak your graphics settings so that you can aim for 60 fps at all times. Nvidia inspector + RTSS will NOT fix stuttering.

How do I fix hitching?

If you want things to stop hitching (or stuttering), either:

1 – lower your settings until you can aim for 60 FPS at all times; this includes lowering resolution and vsync off until you can aim for 60 FPS at all times

2 – buy a better PC or get your computer repaired for free if it is still under warranty.

if you are not sure whether you’re hitching because your hardware is bottlenecked, try toggling vsync on/off in nvidia control panel or amd equivalent to see if that fixes the stuttering problem. if it does, then it was caused by framerate below refreshrate, so keep playing with vsync off to improve performance and lower everything else until you can hit 60 fps at least most of the time.

if none of this works, upgrade your graphics card or get your computer repaired / buy a new one. For people who do not have money but value their time, if you get your computer repaired / buy a new one, make sure to fully format your PC and install only the minimum required programs (such as firefox, notepad++ and chrome).


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Wasim Cheema
By Wasim Cheema

Wasim Cheema is a tech enthusiast who is passionate about all things that have to do with laptops and gadgets. He provides unbiased laptop reviews on different tech sites, where he has been sharing his thoughts on the latest technology for over 8 years now. His technical knowledge has helped him in providing sound advice on various topics including laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other consumer electronics which are often difficult to find a reliable source of information on the web.


The Laptop Arts is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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